How to use "Instance Store Volumes" storage in Amazon EC2?

Solution 1:

If it's not already mounted under e.g. /mnt and if it doesn't have a filesystem created already then do:

1. Check the device name

   sudo fdisk -l

2. Make directory to where you want to mount the volume

   sudo mkdir /mnt

3. Create filesystem on your volume (make sure you choose the correct volume because this creates a new file system on the volume)

   sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvdj

4. Mount volume

   sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/xvdj /mnt

5. If you want to preserve the mount after e.g. a restart, open /etc/fstab and add the mount to it

   echo "/dev/xvdj /mnt auto noatime 0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

6. Make sure nothing is wrong with fstab by mounting all

   mount -a

Solution 2:

The use of instance-local storage that is not persistent when an instance is stopped is pretty simple: It's a very large chunk of space useful for transient things. They're the perfect target for mounting to /tmp, and is extremely useful if your server handles very large files transiently.

For example, if you were building a group of instances to do voice-to-text translation of uploaded video-files, instance-local storage would be just the thing you want to put the in-process files on. It may be there for a few hours while the file is processed, but once it's done it can be deleted and another one taken up. You don't need EBS for that, and it's a lot cheaper to run that kind of storage out of instance-local rather than EBS.

Instance-local storage is meant to be used as scratch-space for running processing, not long-term storage. If your workload doesn't use scratch-space for anything, or what it needs is so small as to not be significant, then it isn't a good fit for you.