CLF-C02 Practice Question 46: Persistent Block Storage
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 5 · question 6 of 10
A developer stopped an Amazon EC2 instance overnight to save money. When they started it again the next morning, the files they had saved on the instance's instance store volume were gone. Where should files be stored so they survive the instance being stopped and started?
Show answer and explanation
Answer:
Amazon EBS provides block storage volumes that you attach to EC2 instances and use like a local hard drive. An EBS volume keeps its data when the instance is stopped and started, and it can be backed up with snapshots. That makes it the right place for data that must outlast the instance's current run.
An instance store is *temporary* block storage on disks physically attached to the host. Its data persists through a reboot but not when the instance is stopped, hibernated or terminated, which is exactly what the developer ran into. It suits buffers, caches and scratch data. Option B does not help, because the size of the volume makes no difference to that behavior. Option C fails because hibernating also erases instance store data. Option D is wrong on two counts: S3 is object storage, not a disk you mount as a block device, and objects in Glacier Flexible Retrieval must be restored before they can be read.
References: What is Amazon Elastic Block Store?; Data persistence for Amazon EC2 instance store volumes