 Everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We're here at AWS with theCUBE talking about storage. Ashish Palakars here is the director of product management for EBS, Elastic Block Storage. Welcome, good to see you again. Nice to see you Dave. So let's talk about EBS. You know, it all started with S3 and then of course customers demand more. What do we need to know about EBS? Like what are the options that you provide? Give us the low down. Yeah, so the way to think about block storage in the AWS construct is really we have two kinds of offerings. One is around instant storage, which is a form of block storage. And then you have a block storage service, which is EBS. And sort of the key thing there from a customer standpoint to differentiate between the two is, if you want your storage lifecycle to be coincident with your instance lifecycle, then you use instant storage. And that's why we see a lot of our customers use instant storage because they want that experience. If you want, on the other hand, a storage lifecycle that's different from your instance lifecycle, so the ability to change instances, the ability to grow sizes, the ability to take backups, then you want to choose the EBS experience. And there we have a series of volume types that customers can consume. We have GP2. We have IO1. We have our stream volumes, which are SC1 and ST1. So when you talk to customers of block storage, what do they tell you that they most care about? Yeah, it is a lot around performance. It is a lot around availability. It is a lot around durability, ease of use. Those are the core characteristics that customers care about. Earlier this year as an example, one of the things that we launched for customers was the ability to encrypt their volumes by default. And you say, well, why is that important? So security becomes a big concern for customers as they think about their environment. And with encryption by default, we just made it simple. With a single setting, you can now, at an account level, ensure that all your EBS volumes created from that point on are fully encrypted. OK, let's talk about snapshots. So how are our snapshots in the cloud different? And how are your customers using snapshots? Yeah, it's a great segue into a common conversation. Customers who are coming from on-premises environments are used to snapshots as being this copy-on-write type of volumes. The way to think about EBS snapshots in particular are really to think of them as backups. And so that is the one key thing that I always tell customers is to think of what we call snapshots really as backups, especially if you're coming from a non-premises environment. OK, how about things you're doing to really improve EBS snapshots? I mean, is it more performance? Is it making simpler, expanding use cases? Yeah, let's talk about the use case scenarios that snapshots get used in. Snapshots are really the underlying storage for what are called Amazon machine images, or AMIs. That is how our instances boot. That is also the way that customers create EBS volumes from. So you can create an EBS volume from a snapshot. So on that particular use case, one of the things that we are now launching is a capability we are calling Fast Snapshot Restore. So you can now take an EBS snapshot, and then within an availability zone, make it such that you can now launch volumes from it without encountering any latency impact. And that, we think, is a tremendously powerful capability for customers, because it takes away all the undifferentiated heavy lifting that they had to do in order to load the data from the snapshot into the EBS volume completely out of the picture and allows them to focus on getting their data to their applications. That's right. All right, we'll give you the last word. Final thoughts on the innovations that you've had, congratulations on all the hard work. No, actually, the team has done a tremendous amount of work in order to launch this. Couldn't be happier to see this in the hands of customers. We look forward to seeing what they build from the things that we're providing them. So excited to see that happen. Well, it's actually quite amazing. It started all very simple with S3, and now we've seen services just become more granular, higher performance, really meeting customer demands issues. Thanks so much for coming. Thank you so much, Dave. All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll be back right after this short break.