Understanding EBS Volumes

Hey everyone,

and ill also be attaching my notes link in the end. which is basically the hand written way for this article.

What are EBS Volumes?

Elastic Block store: Storage volumes that you can attach to your EC2 instances.

  • when you launch a server, it atleast has one EBS volume. That one EBS volume is used to install your operating system.

You can attach multiple EBS Volumes to your single server.

Features:

  1. Production workloads:

    • Designed for mission critical workloads
  2. Highly available

    • Automatically replicated within a single availability zone to protect aganist hardware failures.
  3. Scalable

    • Dynamically increase capacity and change type of volumes within no down time or performance impact to your live systems.
  • EBS Volume Types

    • Solid state drives (SSD-backed) :

      • volumes optimized for transactional workloads involving frequent read/write operations with small I/O size, where the dominant performance attribute is IOPS

        1. General Purpose SSD (gp2/gp3)

        2. Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1/io2/io2 block express)

    • Hard disk drives (HDD-backed) :

      • volumes optimized for large streaming workloads where throughput (measured in MiB/s) is a better performance measure than IOPS

        1. Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)

        2. Cold HDD (sc1)

SOLID STATE Drive ( SSD )

General Purpose SSD ( gp2 , gp3):

-> These are a balance of price and performance and are good for boot volumes or development and test applications which are not latency sensitive.

Provisioned IOPS SSD ( io1, io2, io2 Block Express ):

  • The high performance and most expensive option, if your usecase goes beyond 64,000 IOPS per volume.

  • These are designed for I/O intensive applications, large databases, latency sensitive applications.

  • io2 is same as io1, except that io2 has 99.999% durability instead of upto 99.9%.

io2 Block Express:

-> SAN (Storage Access Network ) in the cloud.

-> Has sub-millisecond latency

-> Provides 4X throughput, IOPS per volume, Capacity of regular io2.

-> supports upto 64TB of Volume size.

-> io2 Block Express is great for largest, most critical high-performace applications like SAP HANA, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2.

Hard disk drives (HDD-backed) volumes:

Throughput Optimized HDD ( st1 ):

-> Great for storing huge amounts (mountains) of data and you want to access the data frequently.

-> BaseLine throughput -> 40 MB/s per TB

-> Ability to Burst upto -> 250 MB/s Per TB

-> Maximum throughput of 500 MB/ S per volume.

-> More useful for frequently - accessed, throughput intensive workloads.

E.g: Bigdata, Data Warehouses, ETL, Log Processing.

-> Cannot be a boot volume.

COLD HDD ( sc1 ):

-> Baseline throughput of 12 MB/S per TB

-> Ability to Burst upto -> 80 MB/s Per TB

-> Maximum throughput of 250 MB/ S per volume.

-> Good choice for colder data requiring fewer scans per day.

-> Good for applications that need lower cost and performance is not a factor.

-> cannot be a boot volume.

My notes:

references:

  1. https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/general-purpose/

  2. https://jayendrapatil.com/aws-ebs-volume-types/