EBS in AWS is great, it’s a quick and easy way to get storage, but what if you want even better performance? Well that’s where instance stores come in. It is like connecting your EC2 instance directly to a physical drive on a server, you get much higher IOPS then you would on an EBS volume. The data will persist on reboot however if the instances is terminated or stopped, etc, the data will be lost so it is best used for temporary data such as cache.