EBS - Elastic Block Store

EBS - Elastic Block Store

  • Volume is a network drive you can attach to your instances while they run

  • Allows your instance to persist data, even after EC2 Instance termination

  • Bound to a specific availability zone

  • Uses network to communicate with the instance, so there may be latency

  • Can be detached from an EC2 instance and attached to another one quickly

  • Locked to an Availability Zone

    • i.e. EBS Volume in us-east-1a cannot be attached to us-east-1b

    • To mobe a volume across, you first need to take a snapshot

  • Have a provisioned capacity (size in GBs, and IOPS)

    • Billed for provisioned capacity

    • Can increase the capacity of the drive over time

  • Multiple EBS Volumes can be attached to a single EC2 Instance

  • EBS Volumes can be created unattached

  • Delete on Termination attribute enabled for root volume by default, but not for additional volumes

  • EBS Volume Types (6 types)

    • gp2/gp3 (SSD): general purpose SSD volume that balances price and performance

    • io1/io2 (SSD): Highest performance SSD volume for mission-critical, low-latency or high-throughput workloads

    • st1 (HDD): Low cost HDD volume designed for frequently access, throughput intensive workloads

    • sc1 (HDD): Lowest cost HDD volume for less frequently accessed workloads)

  • EBS Volumes are characterised in Size/Throughput/IOPS

  • Only gp2/gp3/io1/io2 can be used for boot volume

General Purpose SSD

  • Cost effective storage, low-latency

  • System boot volumes, Virtual Desktops, Development and Test environments

  • 1GiB-16TiB

  • gp3:

    • Baseline of 3,000 IOPS and throughput of 125 MiB/s

    • Can increase IOPS to 16,000 and throughput up to 1000MiB/s independently

  • gp2:

    • Small gp2 volumes can burst to 3,000 IOPS

    • Size of volume and IOPS are linked, max IOPS is 16,000

    • 3 IOPS per GB, means at 5,334GB we are at the max IOPS

Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) SSD

  • Critical business applications with sustained IOPS performance

  • Applications that need more then 16,000 IOPS

  • Great for database workloads (sensitive to storage performance and consistency)

  • io1/io2 (4GiB-16TiB)

    • Max PIOPS: 64,000 for Nitro EC2 instances & 32,000 for other

    • Can increate PIOPS independently from storage size

    • io2 have more durability and more IOPS per GiB (at the same price as io1)

  • io2 Block Express (4GiB-64TiB)

    • Sub-millisecond latency

    • Max PIOPS: 256,000 with an IOPS:GiB ration of 1,000:1

  • Supports EBS Multi-attach

Hard Disk Drives (HDD)

  • Cannot be used as boot volume

  • 125GiB to 16TiB

  • Throughput Optimised HDD (st1)

    • Big Data, Data warehouse, Log Processing

    • Max throughput 500MiB/s - max IOPS 500

  • Cold HDD (sc1)

    • For data which is infrequently accessed

    • Scenarios where lowest cost is important

    • Max throughput 250 MiB/s - max IOPS 250

LogoAmazon EBS volume types - Amazon EBSAmazon EBS

EBS Multi-Attach (io1/io2 family)

  • Attach the same EBS volume to multiple EC2 instances in the same AZ

  • Each instance has full read & write permissions to the high-performance volume

  • Use case:

    • Achieve higher application availability in clustered Linux applications

    • Applications must manage concurrent write operations

  • Up to 16 EC2 Instances at a time

  • Must use a file system that's cluster-aware (not XFS, EXT4 etc)

EBS Snapshots

  • Make a backup (snapshot) of an EBS volume at a point in time

  • Not necessary to detach volume to do a snapshot, but recommended

  • Can copy snapshots across AZ or Region

  • EBS Snapshot Archive

    • Move snapshot to an archive tier which is 75% cheaper

    • Takes 23-72 hours for restoring the archive

  • Recycle Bin

    • Setup rules to retain deleted snapshots so you can recover them after accidental deletion

    • Specify retention from 1 day to 1 year

  • Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR)

    • Force full initialisation of snapshot to have no latency on the first use ($$$)

Last updated