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>> Everybody, this is Dave Vellante.
We're here at AWS with theCUBE talkin' about storage.
Ashish Palekar is here, he's the Director
of Product Management for EBS, Elastic Block Storage.
Welcome, good to see you again.
>> Nice to see you, Dave. >> So, let's talk about EBS.
You know, it all started with S3
and then customers demand more.
What do we need to know about EBS?
What are the options that you provide?
Give us the lowdown. >> Yeah, so the way to think
about block storage in the AWS construct is
really, we've two kinds of offerings.
One is around instance storage,
which is a form of block storage.
And then you have a block storage service, which is EBS.
And sort of the key thing there from a customer standpoint
to differentiate between the two is
if you want your storage lifecycle
to be coincident with your instance lifecycle,
then you use instance storage.
And that's why we see a lot of our customers
use instance storage, because they want that experience.
If you want, on the other hand,
a storage lifecycle that's different
from your instance lifecycle,
so the ability to change instances,
the ability to grow sizes, the ability to take backups,
then you want to choose the EBS experience.
And there, we have a series of volume types
that customers can consume.
We have GP2, we have IO1,
we have our stream volumes, which are SC1 and ST1.
>> So, Ashish, when you talk to customers of block storage,
what do they tell you they most care about?
>> Yeah, it is a lot around performance,
it is a lot around availability,
it is a lot around the ability, ease of use.
Those are the core characteristics
that customers care about.
Earlier this year, as an example,
one of the things that we launched for customers
was the ability to encrypt their volumes by default.
And you say, well why is that important?
So, security becomes the big concern for customers
as they think about their environment,
and with encryption by default, we just made it simple.
With a single setting you can now at an account level
ensure that all your EBS volumes created
from that point on are fully encrypted.
>> Okay, let's talk about snapshots.
So how are or are snapshots in the Cloud different?
And how are your customers using snapshots?
>> Yeah, it's a great, great segue into it,
into common conversation.
Customers who are coming from on premises environment
are used to snapshots as being sort of
this copy and write type volume.
The way to think about AWS snapshots,
EBS snapshots in particular, are really
to think of them as backup.
And so that is the one sort of key thing
that I always tell customers is to think of
what we call snapshots really as backups,
especially if you're coming from a non-premises environment.
>> Okay, how about things you're doing
to really improve EBS snapshots.
Is it more performance, is it making them simpler?
>> Yeah. >> Expanding use cases?
>> Yeah, yeah, let's talk about the use case scenarios
that snapshots get used in.
Snapshots are really the underlying storage
for what are called Amazon Machine Images, or AMIs.
That is how instances boot.
That is also the way that customers create EBS volumes from.
So you can create an EBS volume from a snapshot.
So on that particular use case,
one of the things that we are now launching
is a capability we are calling Fast Snapshot Restore.
So you can now take an EBS snapshot
and then within an availability's zone,
make it such that you can now launch volumes from it
without encountering any latency impact.
And that, we think, is a tremendously powerful capability
for customers, because if you can,
it takes away all the undifferentiated heavy lifting
that we have to do in order to load the data
from the snapshot into the EBS volume
completely out of the picture
and allows them to focus on getting their data
to their applications that way.
>> All right, we'll give you the last word.
Final thoughts on the innovations that you have,
congratulations on all the hard work.
>> No, actually this is the team has done
a tremendous amount of work in our launches.
Could be happier to see this in the hands of customers.
We look forward to seeing what they build
from the things that we've provided them.
So excited to see that happen.
>> Well it's actually quite amazing,
you started all very simple with S3
and now we've seen the services just become more granular,
higher performance, really meeting customer demands.
Ashish, thanks so much for-- >> Thank you so much, David.
>> All right, thanks for watching everybody.
We'll be back right after this short break.
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