Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides persistent block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. In this technical session, we conduct a detailed analysis of the differences among the three types of Amazon EBS block storage: General Purpose (SSD), Provisioned IOPS (SSD), and Magnetic. We discuss how to maximize Amazon EBS performance, with a special eye towards low-latency, high-throughput applications like databases. We discuss Amazon EBS encryption and share best practices for Amazon EBS snapshot management. Throughout, we share tips for success.