What is the story with AWS storage?

The text discusses three broad categories of storage in AWS: instance store (ephemeral), EBS (Elastic Block Storage), and S3. EBS is mountable storage that can be mounted as a device to an EC2 instance, while S3 is a web-based storage service replicated across regions. Both are persistent and exist independent of an EC2 instance. EBS is further refined into two categories: Standard and Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS). PIOPS is tunable and predictable, with the desired number of IOPS per volume guaranteed. Instance store or ephemeral storage is physically attached to an EC2 instance but evaporates when the instance is shut down. AWS has started offering beefier machines with "direct-attached" storage that is not a shared resource like instance store and can be faster and more reliable.