Large volume at /mnt on AWS instance

I know this is probably a somewhat 'dumb' question :)

I have an AWS (small) instance and I just noticed that there is a ~150gb volume attached at /mnt, is this normal?

It kinda freaked me out, I was thinking maybe someone was trying to capture whatever I mount in /mnt, there is the entry in my fstab too (and I found that others have this by googling)... the entry is as follows

/dev/xvdb   /mnt    auto    defaults,nobootwait,comment=cloudconfig 0   2

I don't have any volumes this large in my AWS volumes section though. I was just trying to understand this and be sure that someone is not trying to 'get in'... as there are many attempts daily.

Thanks

rhaag71

Posted 2012-10-09T09:33:12.333

Reputation: 215

Answers

It's called ephemeral/instance storage (see http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/). Basically, it's temporary storage space which is cleared on instance stop/termination. Suitable for temporary storage.

por

Posted 2012-10-09T09:33:12.333

Reputation: 271

Thank you, I figured it was such but couldn't confirm... and didn't panic but wanted to know. I did all my development on the micro instance and just went production recently. – rhaag71 – 2012-10-09T15:44:31.263

1Um, no, it exists still after reboot. If you terminate the instance or the instance dies on its own, that disk storage is lost, so back it up to S3. – None – 2012-10-09T18:16:30.713

Ephemeral storage survives reboot, but is cleared on stop/start, terminate, and instance failure. I explain more differences between reboot and stop/start here: http://alestic.com/2011/09/ec2-reboot-stop-start

– Eric Hammond – 2012-10-09T21:33:14.303