what's the difference between attach and mount in ebs for amazon ec2

Question

If I attach an EBS instance to my EC2 instance, isn't that the same as mounting? According to various guides they do different things. What's the difference between attaching an EBS instance and mounting?

Answer 1

Attaching a volume simply attaches the volume as a block device to the instance. This action only allows the device to be visible within the operating system.

To use it, you will need to format it, and mount it to the file system. Mount is terminology use more often in Linux than Windows. In Linux you are actually using the mount command to assign the device to a point in the file system. In windows you would assign a drive letter to the volume via disk management.