AWS recently announced the Volume Clones capability for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), allowing users to create instant point-in-time copies of their EBS volumes within the same Availability Zone.
Amazon EBS provides persistent, block-level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. The company states that with the new capability, Volume Clones, users can create copies of their EBS volumes with a single API call or console click. Sébastien Stormacq, developer evangelist at AWS, highlighted the primary use case:
The copied volumes are available within seconds, providing immediate access to your data with single-digit millisecond latency. This makes Volume Clones particularly useful for quickly setting up test environments with production data or creating temporary copies of databases for development purposes.
(Source: AWS News blog)
Furthermore, Volume Clones integrates with the Amazon EBS Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver, making storage management for containerized applications easier.
Luc van Donkersgoed, an AWS Serverless Hero, posted on LinkedIn:
I swear the things AWS manages to squeeze out of their data centers should be classified as black magic. You can now create instant copies of EBS volumes with single-digit millisecond latency. Sounds simple – but this is an amazing feat of engineering.
The quick availability is the core differentiating factor, though the initial complexity of the AWS ecosystem was a humorous point of contention, as a Snark bot from lastweekinaws posted on Bluesky:
AWS announces you can now clone EBS volumes instantly! Just navigate through 47 pricing tiers, 23 availability restrictions, and a pricing calculator that requires a PhD in theoretical mathematics.
In addition, the company has some recommendations regarding Volume Clones:
- Users can create copies of encrypted volumes within the same Availability Zone, with sizes equal to or greater than the source volume. These clones are crash-consistent like snapshots, but for application consistency, users should pause I/O operations before copying, using functions like pg_start_backup() for PostgreSQL or xfs_freeze on Linux.
- While Volume Clones are point-in-time copies, they should complement rather than replace EBS snapshots, which are recommended for backup due to their durability (11 nines) and incremental backups to Amazon S3. Volume Clones are best for test and development environments where instant access is needed.
- Copied volumes operate independently and incur standard EBS charges until deleted. It’s wise to implement rules to manage and remove unnecessary copied volumes, thereby controlling costs effectively.
Yet, the capability also has some limitations, as a respondent on a Reddit thread commented:
You can create copies from encrypted source volumes only. You can’t create copies from unencrypted source volumes
Interesting limitation. I wonder why.
Lastly, Volume Clones support all EBS volume types within the same AWS account and Availability Zone. Pricing includes a one-time fee per GiB of data on the source volume at initiation, plus standard EBS pricing for the new volume. The capability is available in all AWS commercial Regions, selected Local Zones, and AWS GovCloud (US).
