When people talk about cloud storage, they usually refer to storage that is accessible from outside the cloud, to stores files, pictures, and backups. Sometimes referred as object storage, a good example of this type of cloud storage is Amazon S3. In this article, I will be focusing on a different type of cloud storage – the storage needed by cloud servers to run their applications. This storage is accessed from inside the cloud and used by the cloud servers to mount their filesystems and databases. In Amazon AWS’s terminology, this is what is called EBS. A MySQL database or MS NTFS are good examples of a database and filesystem that will use a block storage device and not object storage.