ylastic blog

EC2 block devices are really useful and we use them quite a bit over here at Ylastic. We have been improving support for specifying these mappings when you launch an EBS backed instance. Today's Ylastic release makes it very easy to do a bunch of things.

• Over-ride default block device mappings. For instance, if the AMI was created with a mapping like /dev/sda1=snap-xyz::True, you can modify it to change its default size or the delete on termination and specify it like this - /dev/sda1=snap-xyz:20:False.
• Connect instance local storage when you launch an EBS backed instance. The instance local storage drives are available but by default EC2 will not connect them to the EBS instance. So when you launch the instance, specify how you would like to connect them. For Linux, you can specify a mapping like /dev/sdb=ephemeral0, and if you are using windows, just specify it as /dev/xvdg=ephemeral0. Keep in mind that the new t1.micro instances are EBS storage only, and you will not be able to connect local instance storage to them.
• Specify multiple block device mappings at launch. As simple as can be. Just comma separate the device mappings and we will pass it on to EC2 when the instance is launched.

Here's a screenshot of the stock Windows Server EBS version (ami-c3e40daa) launched from Ylastic and connecting the first ephemeral disk to device xvdg, which shows up as drive d: in Windows File Explorer.

Enjoy :-)