Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon EC2, catering to a wide range of workloads and offering six different volume types for balanced pricing and performance. EBS ensures high availability and durability through volume replication within availability zones, supports easy scaling and backup, and provides secure encryption options. The document also discusses EC2 instance states, elastic network interfaces, and their configuration for optimized networking in a virtual private cloud.