Amazon Elastic Block Store (original) (raw)

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Cloud-based raw storage service

Amazon Elastic Block Store

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)[a] | 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[b]/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−month0.125/GB-month0.125/GB−month0.065/provisioned IOPS | 0.10/GB−month∣0.10/GB-month | 0.10/GB−month∣0.08/GB-month$0.005/provisioned IOPS over 3000 | 0.045/GB−month∣0.045/GB-month | 0.045/GB−month∣0.025/GB-month | | Dominant performance attribute | IOPS | IOPS | IOPS | MB/s | MB/s |

1. ^ Default volume type
2. ^ io1/gp2 based on 16 KiB I/O size, st1/sc1 based on 1 MiB I/O size

Amazon EBS provides several features that assist with data management, backups, and performance tuning:

• The Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager is an automated mechanism that can back up data from EBS volumes, creating and deleting EBS snapshots on a predefined schedule.[8]
• Elastic Volumes makes it possible to adapt volume size to an application's current needs, using Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Lambda to automate volume changes.
• Amazon EBS Encryption encrypts data at rest for EBS volumes and snapshots, without having to manage a separate secure key infrastructure.
• EBS volume tagging makes it possible to find and filter EBS resources on the Amazon Console and CLI.[9]
• Software-level RAID arrays make it possible to create groups of EBS volumes with high performance network throughput between them, using the standard RAID protocol.[10]
• Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)
• Amazon S3

1. ^ "DB Instance Storage - Amazon Relational Database Service". docs.aws.amazon.com.
2. ^ "EC2 Instance Store vs EBS". May 31, 2022. Archived from the original on June 16, 2022. Retrieved June 16, 2022.
3. ^ "Constraints on the size and configuration of an EBS volume". Amazon Web Services Documentation. Archived from the original on 2017-10-11. Retrieved Sep 11, 2020.
4. ^ "Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - Bring Us Your Data". Amazon Web Services Blog. August 20, 2008. Archived from the original on March 28, 2011. Retrieved May 31, 2013.
5. ^ "AWS Free Tier". Amazon Web Services, Inc.
6. ^ "Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) – Details – Amazon Web Services (AWS)". Amazon Web Services, Inc. Retrieved 2017-12-31.
7. ^ "Announcing Provisioned IOPS for Amazon EBS". Amazon Web Services, Inc.
8. ^ "Amazon EBS Features". Amazon Web Services. Archived from the original on 2018-09-20. Retrieved Sep 11, 2020.
9. ^ "7 Little-Known Amazon EBS Features You Should Be Using". Sand Hill. January 17, 2020. Archived from the original on 2020-01-27. Retrieved Sep 11, 2020.
10. ^ "AWS EBS: A Complete Guide and Five Functions You Should Start Using". Cloud Central Blog. June 4, 2019. Archived from the original on 2017-07-26. Retrieved Sep 11, 2020.

• Amazon Elastic Block Store main page