Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage) is a persistent block-level storage as a service that works in conjunction with EC2 instances. It provides redundancy and data backup capabilities through snapshotting, allowing for easy creation of duplicate datasets or migration of application infrastructure to multiple locations. EBS volumes are virtualized, networked drives that share infrastructure with other users, so disk performance is tightly linked to network performance and throughput. Many EC2 instance types are EBS-optimized, providing dedicated bandwidth to EBS volumes separate from the instance's other network activity. EBS volumes come in different flavors, including solid-state drives (SSD) and hard disk drives (HDD), each with unique characteristics that affect their performance and usage charges. It is essential to monitor EBS volume metrics, such as IOPS, throughput, latency, disk activity, status checks, events, and disk space metrics, to ensure optimal performance, optimize resource utilization, and troubleshoot issues with applications running on these volumes.