Introducing Amazon EBS Volume Clones: Create Instant Copies Of Your EBS Volumes
AWS, Tuesday, October 14th, 2025
As someone that used to work at Sun Microsystems, where ZFS was invented, I've always loved working with storage systems that offer instant volume copies for my development and testing needs.
Today, I'm excited to share that AWS is bringing similar capabilities to Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) with the launch of Amazon EBS Volume Clones, a new capability that lets you create instant point-in-time copies of your EBS volumes within the same Availability Zone.
Many customers need to create copies of their production data to support development and testing activities in a separate nonproduction environment. Until now, this process required taking an EBS snapshot (stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)) and then creating a new volume from that snapshot. Although this approach works, the process creates operational overhead due to multiple steps.