EBS¶
What's an EBS Volume?¶
- EBS is a network attached volume to persist data.
- Can be de-ttached and re-attached to another EC2 instance in the same AZ.
- Bound to an AZ.
- Capacity must be provisioned in advance (IOPS, and volume size).
- Billed for all provisioned capacity, even if it's not used.
- Capacity can be increased as needed.
- Only GP2 and IO1 can be used as boot volumes.
- Enable "Delete on Termination" to delete the EBS volume when the EC2 instance is terminated. By default it's enabled on the root volume.
EBS Attributes¶
- Size
- Throughput
- IOPS
EBS Volume Types¶
| Volume Type | Optimised for | Boot Volume | Uses | Size | IOPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GP2 (SSD) | Balance price vs performance. | Yes | General purpose. Low latency interactive apps Virtual desktops Dev/Test environments Recommended for most workloads. |
1GB-16TB | 3 IOPS/GB Minimum 100 IOPS with burst to 3000. Maximum 16,000 IOPS. IOPS scales with volume size. |
| GP3 (SSD) | Balance price vs performance. | Yes | General purpose. Low latency interactive apps Virtual desktops Dev/Test environments Recommended for most workloads. |
1GB-16TB | Minimum 3,000 IOPS and 125MB/s. Maximum 16,000 IOPS and/or 1000MB/s. |
| IO1/IO2 (SSD) | High performance SSD | Yes | Large workloads & critical business applications - DB servers etc. Highest performance SSD. Expensive. IO2 should be preferred over IO1 because it gets more IOPS/GB, and more durability. |
4GB-16TB | 50IOPS/GB Minimum 100 IOPS, upto 32,000. Or 64,00 with Nitro instance. Supports EBS multi-attach. |
| IO2 Block Express (SSD) | High performance SSD | Yes | Large workloads & critical business applications - DB servers etc. Highest performance SSD. Expensive. Sub millisecond latency. Supports EBS multi-attach. |
4GB-64TB | 1,000IOPS/GB, upto 256,000 IOPS |
| ST1 (HDD) | Frequently accessed, throughput intensive workloads. | No | Kafka Data warehouses Log processing Low cost. |
125MB-16TB | Maximum 500 IOPS Maximum 500MB/sec through-put. |
| SC1 (HDD) | Infrequently accessed data | No | Cheapest. Good for cold backups, snapshots. | 125MB-16TB | Maximum 250MB/sec throughput with 250 IOPS. |
EBS Snapshots¶
- Can be copied across regions/AZs.
- Don't necessarily have to detach the volume to take a snapshot.
- Can create a new volume from a snapshot.
EBS Multi Attach¶
- Attach same EBS volume to multiple EC2 instances in the same AZ.
- Good for clustered applications (eg: teradata).
- Must use a cluster aware file system.
- Only for IO1 or IO2.
Last update: June 30, 2021