title: Determining if ephemeral storage is attached to an instance in Amazon Web Services console?
body: <p>Short question:</p>
  
  <p>How do I know if an instance has ephemeral storage attached?  Do I have to <code>ssh</code> in and look at the mounts with <code>lsblk</code> on Linux?</p>
  
  <p>Since ephemeral storage is lost when an instance is stopped, you need to know if ephemeral drives are attached at all.  The first thing to check is the "root device type" of the instance, if it is EBS, then you don't have to worry about losing data (unless the EBS volume is set to 'delete on terminate'). </p>
  
  <p>However, if it is "instance-store" you will lose the data on that drive when the instance starts. Then look at the "root device" and "block devices" and see if they are all associated with EBS volumes. That's easy. Where it gets cloudy, is when you attach an ephemeral drive to an instance (at launch time), but the console doesn't represent it like it does for an additional EBS volume.  Further, you may need to manually mount the drive yourself...</p>
  
  <p>How can you easily know from the AWS Console if an ephemeral drive is attached?</p>