Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing service now comes with Elastic Block Storage (EBS) to eliminate the loss of data when a computing instance was shut down.EC2 is used by businesses for database applications, Web application development, and other computing tasks. Up to now, data in an EC2 computing instance disappeared when that instance shut down, forcing users to manually tie their tasks to Amazon's Simple Storage Service. EBS enables users to mount persistent virtual storage independent of EC2 instances.

"As an EC2 instance is to a traditional server, an EBS instance is to a traditional disk," said Adam Selipsky, VP of product management and developer relations for Amazon Web Services. Users can store up to 1 TB of data in a single instance of EBS and can scale to as many EBS instances as they need.InformationWeek