EBS Volumes

Storage volumes you can attach to your EC2 instances.

Mission Critical

🟢 production workloads. designed for mission critical workloads

🟢 highly available. automatically replicated within a single AZ to protect against hardware failures.

🟢 scalable. dynamically increase capacity and chnage the volume type with no downtime or performance impact to your live systems.

EBS Volume Types: Solid State Disk

General Purpose SSD (gp2) - legacy

  • 3 IOPS per GiB, up to maximum of 16,000 IOPS per volume

regardless of how large the volume is, the maximum number of input/output operations the storage system can handle for that volume is 16,000 per second. this is the upper limit on the performance you can expect from the volume.

  • gp2 volumes smaller than 1TB can burst up to 3,000 IOPS

  • good for boot volumes or development and test applications that are not latency sensitive

General Purpose SSD (gp3)

  • predictable 3,000 IOPS baseline performance and 125 MiB/s regardless of volume size

  • ideal for applications that require high performace but not high storage capacity, such as MySQL, Cassandra, and Hadoop clusters.

  • customers looking for higher performance can scale up to 16,000 IOPS and 1,000 MiB/s for an additional fee.

  • the top performance of gp3 is 4 times faster then max throughput of gp2 volumes.

Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) - legacy

high-performance option and the most expensive

  • up to 64, 000 IOPS per volume. 50 IOPS per GiB

  • use if you need > 16,000 IOPS

  • designed for I/O-intensive applications, large databases, and latency-sensitive workloads.

Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2)

applications that need high levels of durability

  • latest generation. 500 IOPS per GiB up to 64,000 IOPS

  • 99,999% durability instead of up to 99,9%

  • I/O intensive apps, large databases, and latency-sensitive workloads.

EBS Volume Types: Hard Disk Drive (MB/s-intensive)

Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)

low-cost HDD volume

  • baseline throughput of 40 MB/s per TB

  • ability to burst up to 250 MB/s per TB

  • maximum throughput of 500 MB/s per volume

  • frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads

  • big data, data warehouses, ETL, and log processing

  • a cost-affective way to store mountains of data

❕ cannot be a boot volume

Cold HDD (sc1)

  • baseline throughput of 12 MB/s per TB

  • ability to burst up to 80 MB/s per TB

  • maximum throughput of 250 MB/s per volume

  • good choice for colder data requiring fewer scans per day

  • big data, data warehouses, ETL, and log processing

  • good for applications that need the lower cost and performance is not a factor

❕ cannot be a boot volume

IOPS vs Throughput

IOPS Throughput
measures the number of read and write operations per second measures the number of bits read or written per second (MB/s)
important metric for qwick transations, low-latency apps, transactional workloads important metricfor large datasets, large I/O sizes, complex queries
the ability to action reads and writes very qwickly the ability to deal with large datasets
choose Provisioned SSD (io1 or io2) choose Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)

Volumes and Snapshots

What are Volumes?

exists on EBS

Storage drives (or volumes as they’re described in AWS documentation) are for the most part virtualized spaces carved out of larger physical drives. To the OS running on your instance, however, all AWS volumes will present themselves exactly as though they were normal physical drives.

What are Snapshots?

exists on S3

  • think of snapshot as a photograph of the virtual disk/volume
  • snapshots are point in time

when you take a snapshot, it is a point-in-time copy of a volume.

  • snapshots are incremental

this means only the data that has been changed since your last snapshot are moved to S3. this saves on space and the time to take a snapshot.

Encrypting Volumes

  • data at rest is encrypted inside the volume

  • all data in flight moving between the instance and vthe volume is encryped

  • all snapshots are encrypted.

  • all volumes created from the snapshot are encrypted

4 Steps to Encrypt an Unecrypted Volume

  1. Create a snapshot of unencrypted root device volume
  2. Create a copy of the snapshot and select the encrypt option.
  3. Create an AMI from the encrypted snapshot.
  4. Use the AMI to launch new encrypted instances.

References

Migrate your Amazon EBS volumes from gp2 to gp3 and save up to 20% on costs