What is the purpose of Amazon EBS snapshots?

The primary purpose of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots is to create backups of EBS volumes, allowing these snapshots to be restored when necessary or moved to different regions or accounts. Snapshots capture the state of an EBS volume at a specific point in time, preserving all the data contained within it. This feature is crucial for data protection and recovery strategies, as it ensures that users can revert to previous states of their data in the event of accidental deletions, corruption, disasters, or system failures.

Moreover, the snapshots are stored in Amazon S3, which provides high durability and availability, further enhancing their reliability as a backup solution. Users can create snapshots manually or configure them to be taken automatically, ensuring regular backups without intervention.

The other options do not pertain to the functionality of EBS snapshots. Monitoring real-time performance metrics is related to services like Amazon CloudWatch, deploying application updates pertains to deployment services such as AWS CodeDeploy, and managing network routing is handled by services like Amazon Route 53 or AWS Transit Gateway. Each of these functions is distinct and supports different aspects of cloud infrastructure management.