EBS

What is IOPS

IOPS stands for Input/Output Per Second. It is the speed at which non-contiguous reads and writes can be performed on a storage medium. High I/O = lots of small, fast reads and writes

What is Throughput?

The data transfer rate to and from the storage medium in mb/s.

What is Bandwidth?

Bandwidth is the measurement of the total possible speed of data movement along the network

Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a highly available and durable solution for attaching persistent block storage volumes to an EC2 instance.

Volumes are automatically replicated within their AZ to protect from component failure.

The types of volumes you can deploy:

  • General Purpose SSD (gp2) — for general usage without specific requirements
  • General Purpose SSD (gp3) — up to 20% lower cost per GB than gp2
  • Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) - when you require really fast input & output
  • Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) - more durable than io1
  • io2 Block Express — higher throughput and IOPS and support larger storage capacity
  • Cold HDD (sc1) — Lowest cost HDD volume for infrequently access workloads
  • Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) - magnetic drive optimized for quick throughput
  • Magnetic (standard) - previous generation HDD

Volume Type Usage

General Purpose SSD Volumes Provisioned IOPS SSD Volume
Volume Type gp2 gp3 io2 io2 Block Express
Usage Case Most general workloads
  • Transactional workloads
  • Virtual desktops
  • Medium-sized, single-instance databases
  • Low-latency interactive applications
  • Boot volumes
  • Workloads that require sustained IOPS performance of more than 16,000 IOPS
  • I/O-intensive database workloads
  • Sub-millisecond latency
  • Sustained IOPS performance
  • More than 64,000 IOPS or 1,000 MiB/s of throughput
Durability 98.8%-99.9% 98.8%-99.9% 99.999%
Volume Size 1 GiB - 16 TiB 4 GiB - 16 TiB 4 GiB - 64 TiB
Max IOPs 16,600 (16 KiB I/O) 64,000 (16KiB I/O) 256,600 (16KiB I/O)
Max Throughput 250 MiB/s 1000 MiB/s 1000 MiB/s 4000 MiB/s
Max IOPs 16,600 (16 KiB I/O) 64,000 (16KiB I/O) 256,600 (16KiB I/O)
EBS Multi-attach Not Supported Supported
NVMe Reservation Not Supported Supported
NVMe Reservation Supported
Throughput Optimized HDD Cold HDD Magnetic
Volume Type st1 sc1 standard
Usage Case
  • Big data
  • Data warehouses/li>
  • Log processing
  • Throughput-oriented storage for data that is infrequently accessed
  • Where the lowest cost is important/li>
  • Workloads where data is infrequently accessed
Durability 98.8%-99.9% N/A
Volume Size 125 GiB - 16 TiB 1 GiB - 1 TiB
Max IOPs 500(1 MiB I/O) 250(1 MiB I/O) 40-200
Max Throughput 500 MiB/s 250 MiB/s 40-90 MiB/s
EBS Multi-attach Not Supported N/A
Boot Volume Not Supported Supported