Amazon Elastic Block

Store (EBS)
 Amazon EBS

Amazon EBS:
 Allows users to create storage volumes and attach them to Amazon EC2 instances
 Then, users can create a file system on top of these volumes, run a database, or use them in
any other way they would use block storage
 Amazon EBS volumes are placed in a specific Availability Zone where they are automatically
replicated to protect users from the failure of a single component
 All EBS volume types offer durable snapshot capabilities and are designed for high availability
 Amazon EBS provides a range of options that allow users to optimize storage performance and
cost for users’ workload
 These options are divided into two major categories:
 HDD-backed storage for throughput intensive workloads, such as MapReduce and log processing
(performance depends primarily on MB/s)
 SSD-backed storage for transactional workloads, such as databases and boot volumes (performance
depends primarily on IOPS)
How Amazon EBS works

https://d1.awsstatic.com/
 HDD-backed volumes

 HDD-backed volumes include Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) for frequently accessed, throughput intensive
workloads and the lowest cost Cold HDD (sc1) for less frequently accessed data
 The following table shows use cases and performance characteristics of current generation EBS volumes for HDD
category:

Hard Disk Drives (HDD)

Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) Cold HDD (sc1)
types
Lowest cost HDD volume designed
Low cost HDD volume designed for frequently
Short Description for less frequently accessed
accessed, throughput intensive workloads
workloads

Colder data requiring fewer scans

Use Cases Big data, data warehouses, log processing
per day

Volume Size 125 GB - 16 TB 125 GB - 16 TB

Max
500 MB/s 250 MB/s
Throughput***/Volume

Price $0.045/GB-month $0.015/GB-month

https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/features/
 SSD-backed volumes

 Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes are designed to deliver a maximum of 256,000 IOPS, 4,000 MB/s of
throughput, and 64 TiB in size per volume
 SSD-backed volumes include the highest performance Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 and io1) for
latency-sensitive transactional workloads and General Purpose SSD (gp3 and gp2) that balance
price and performance for a wide variety of transactional data.
 Elastic Volumes is a feature of Amazon EBS that allows users to dynamically increase capacity,
tune performance, and change the type of live volumes with no downtime or performance
impact
 This allows users to easily right-size their deployment and adapt to performance changes
 Amazon EBS Volume Types

The
 State
Solid following table shows useEBScases
EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2
and performance
Provisioned EBS Provisioned
characteristics of currentEBS
EBS General Purpose SSD
generation
General Purpose SSD
Drives
EBS
(SSD) types
volumes BlockforExpress)
SSD category:IOPS SSD (io2) IOPS SSD (io1) (gp3) (gp2)

Highest performance and

Highest performance SSD General Purpose SSD volume that
Highest performance SSD volume highest durability SSD Lowest cost SSD volume that balances
Short volume designed for balances price performance for a
designed for business-critical latency- volume designed for price performance for a wide variety of
Description latency-sensitive wide variety of transactional
sensitive transactional workloads latency-sensitive transactional workloads
transactional workloads workloads
transactional workloads

Virtual desktops, medium sized single

Largest, most I/O intensive, mission critical
deployments of NoSQL and relational
Use Cases
databases such as Oracle, SAP HANA,
Microsoft SQL Server, and SAS Analytics
I/O-intensive NoSQL and I/O-intensive NoSQL and
relational databases
Virtual desktops, medium sized single
instance databases such as Microsoft
instance databases such as Microsoft
SQL Server and Oracle, latency
SQL Server and Oracle, latency sensitive
relational databases sensitive interactive applications,
interactive applications, boot volumes,
boot volumes, and dev/test
and dev/test environments
environments

Volume Size 4 GB – 64 TB 4 GB – 16 TB 4 GB - 16 TB 1 GB - 16 TB 1 GB - 16 TB

Max
Throughput***/ 4,000 MB/s 1,000 MB/s 1,000 MB/s 1,000 MB/s 250 MB/s
Volume

$0.08/GB-month
$0.125/GB-month
$0.125/GB-month 3,000 IOPS free and $0.005/provisioned
$0.065/provisioned IOPS-month up to 32,000 IOPS
Price $0.065/provisioned IOPS- IOPS-month over 3,000; $0.10/GB-month
$0.046/provisioned IOPS-month from 32,001 to 64,000
month 125 MB/s free and $0.04/provisioned
$0.032/provisioned IOPS-month for greater than 64,000 IOPS
MB/s-month over 125

https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/features/