Block storage disks in Lightsail

tl;dr

Every Lightsail server comes with high-performing, persistent SSD-based block storage. Your system disk is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone to protect you from component failure. This offers you high availability and durability. You can also create additional block storage disks and attach them to your Lightsail instances.

Last updated: July 10, 2019

System disks offer the consistent and low-latency performance you need to run your workloads. With Lightsail disks, you can scale your usage up or down within minutes—and pay a low price for only what you provision.

You can select up to an 80 GB system disk on your Linux/Unix-based or Windows Server-based instance. See Get started with Linux-based instances in Lightsail or Get started with Windows Server-based instances.

You can also add more storage to your virtual private server by creating additional block storage disks. See Create additional block storage disks in Lightsail (Linux/Unix) or Creating and attaching block storage disks to your Windows Server instance in Amazon Lightsail.

Lightsail block storage disks

Block storage is a storage architecture that manages data as "blocks". Each storage block (known as a "disk" in Lightsail) acts like an individual hard disk that you can attach to your server. In general, you can use additional block storage for applications or software that must separate out specific data from their core service, and to protect application data in case of a failure or other issue with your instance and boot storage disk.

Lightsail offers solid-state drives (SSD) for block storage. This type of block storage balances a reasonable price and good performance. It's intended to support the vast majority of workloads that run on Lightsail. Lightsail additional block storage disks offer consistent performance and the low latency needed for applications or software that frequently access stored data.

Note

For customers with applications that require sustained IOPS performance or high amounts of throughput per disk, or for customers running large databases like MongoDB, Cassandra, etc., we recommend using Amazon EC2 with GP2 or Provisioned IOPS SSD storage instead of Lightsail.

You can learn more about Amazon EBS volumes in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

Disk Quotas

• 20,000 GB per Region.

• 16 TB per disk maximum, or 8 GB per disk minimum.

• Each instance can have up to 15 attached disks, and 1 boot volume disk.