Scalable Infrastructure experts blog.

You can connect different storage types to  Amazon EC2 instances , two of them provided naively by Amazon platform and the rest are either provided by external sources or tweaks.  In  any EC2 instance (except micro) you have instance storage  included in a package. You can also use  elastic block storage (EBS)  and have an option connecting different  3rd party storage  over the network.   Instance storage is a fast non-persistent storage  provided by Amazon. It means it will revert to it`s original state after any system shutdown, erasing any changes you have applied to the file-system. It is very useful for running “dumb” servers that do not store data locally or as an additional storage for temporary files.   Elastic block storage (EBS) is a persistent storage  provided by Amazon. All and any data stored on it is available after instance shutdown and can be manipulated with on device level. For example you can detach an EBS volume from one instance and attach it to another

If you want to set Filezilla  ftp server to handle passive connections on your AWS EC2 instances, you should do the following. Select non used TCP ports, for example 9024-9048 range Configure firewalls: In your AWS EC2 security group , allow the incoming connections on chosen ports: tcp port 20 tcp port 21 tcp port 9024-9048 If using Windows firewall  on you instance, allow connections on same ports. Now configure Filezilla to use specific port range on Passive connections: Open Filezilla management console. Got to: Edit > Settings > Passive Mode Settings ' External Server IP Address for passive mode transfers ' If you use AWS Elastic IP , enter it in " Use the following IP ", if not - use Filezilla provided web service with " Retrieve external IP address from " option. Check ' Don't use external IP for local connections ' Check ' Use custom port range ' Enter chosen values (in our example) 9024 - 90