Amazon Announced the new Feature: Boot from Elastic Block Store
“You can now launch Amazon EC2 instances from an AMI backed by Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store). This new functionality enables you to launch an instance with an Amazon EBS volume that serves as the root device.
This new feature brings a number of important performance and operational benefits and also enables some really powerful new features:
* Headroom – The root device (and hence the Amazon Machine Image or AMI) can now occupy up to 1 TB. You can now create more richly featured AMIs, installing additional tools, libraries, applications, and even reference data ahead of time.
* Flexibility – Each AMI can now reference one or more EBS snapshots. An EBS volume will be created from each snapshot and then attached to the new instance before it begins to boot. For instance, you could attach reference data such as a Public Data Set to each new instance.
* Performance – Instances will launch more quickly when they are booted from an EBS snapshot.
* Control – Instances can be stopped and then restarted at a later time. The contents of the volume are, of course, preserved while the instance is stopped, so you get the benefits of a persistent root device without being tied down to a particular piece of compute hardware.”
To test this feature, updated API tools is needed to be installed.
AWS Blog Announcement
Amazon API Tool to Boot from EBS
My previous post: Testing Bootable EBS with different AKI and ARI
Exciting feature to test and make use of it on production systems. 😉