You can use the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) direct APIs to
create EBS snapshots, write data directly to your snapshots, read data on
your snapshots, and identify the differences or changes between two
snapshots. If you’re an independent software vendor (ISV) who offers backup
services for Amazon EBS, the EBS direct APIs make it more efficient and
cost-effective to track incremental changes on your EBS volumes through
snapshots. This can be done without having to create new volumes from
snapshots, and then use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances
to compare the differences.