Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides raw block-level storage that can be attached to Amazon EC2 instances and is used by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).[1] It is one of the two block-storage options offered by AWS, with the other being the EC2 Instance Store.[2]
Amazon EBS provides a range of options for storage performance and cost. These options are divided into two major categories: SSD-backed storage for transactional workloads, such as databases and boot volumes (performance depends primarily on IOPS), and disk-backed storage for throughput intensive workloads, such as MapReduce and log processing (performance depends primarily on MB/s).
In a typical use case, using EBS would include formatting the device with a filesystem and mounting it. EBS supports advanced storage features, including snapshotting and cloning. As of September 2020, EBS volumes can be up to 2 TiB in size using the MBR partitioning scheme, and up to 16 TiB using the GPT partitioning scheme.[3]
EBS volumes are built on replicated back end storage, so that the failure of a single component will not cause data loss.
EBS was introduced by Amazon in August 2008.[4] As of March 2018 30 GB of free space was included in the free tier of Amazon Web Services 2017.[5]
The following table shows use cases and performance characteristics of current generation EBS volumes:[6]
Solid state drives (SSD) | Hard disk drives (HDD) | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Volume type | EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) (since 2012) [7] | EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2) | EBS General Purpose SSD (gp3) | Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) | Cold HDD (sc1) | |
Short description | Highest performance SSD volume designed for latency-sensitive transactional workloads | General Purpose SSD volume that balances price performance for a wide variety of transactional workloads | Lowest cost SSD volume that balances price performance for a wide variety of transactional workloads | Low cost HDD volume designed for frequently accessed, throughput intensive workloads | Lowest cost HDD volume designed for less frequently accessed workloads | |
Use cases | I/O-intensive NoSQL and relational databases | Boot volumes, low-latency interactive apps, dev & test | Boot volumes, low-latency interactive apps, dev & test | Big data, data warehouses, log processing | Colder data requiring fewer scans per day | |
API name | io1 | gp2 | gp3 | st1 | sc1 | |
Volume size | 4 GiB - 16 TiB | 1 GiB - 16 TiB | 1 GiB - 16 TiB | 500 GiB - 16 TiB | 500 GiB - 16 TiB | |
Max IOPS/volume | 64,000 | 16,000 | 16,000 | 500 | 250 | |
Max throughput/volume | 1000 MB/s | 250 MB/s | 1000 MB/s | 500 MB/s | 250 MB/s | |
Max IOPS/instance | 260,000 | 260,000 | 260,000 | 260,000 | 260,000 | |
Max throughput/instance | 7,500 MB/s | 7,500 MB/s | 7,500 MB/s | 7,500 MB/s | 7,500 MB/s | |
Price | $0.125/GB-month $0.065/provisioned IOPS | $0.10/GB-month | $0.08/GB-month $0.005/provisioned IOPS over 3000 | $0.045/GB-month | $0.025/GB-month | |
Dominant performance attribute | IOPS | IOPS | IOPS | MB/s | MB/s |
Amazon EBS provides several features that assist with data management, backups, and performance tuning: