Amazon AWS – Elastic Block Store – EBS – Overview

This article will walk through about Elastic Block Store (EBS)  volume and it’s use cases. The last article walk through about EC2 and different prizing options and various type of EC2 instances available in Amazon Public cloud. Before launching the first EC2 instance , you must know about EBS and it’s use. Amazon EBS is persistent block storage volume which is mostly used to install the operating system, install the database and wherever the block level storage is required. It can also be the primary choice for low latency interactive applications that demand high IOPS and predictable performance.  Each Amazon EBS volume is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone to protect you from hardware failure (Ex: Disk , Storage array), offering high availability.

Here is the list of Amazon EBS volumes available :

• EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2) Volumes
• EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) Volumes
• EBS Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) Volumes
• EBS Cold HDD (sc1) Volume
• EBS Snapshots

EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2) Volumes:

EBS general purpose volumes are most often used in Amazon EC2 since its balances both prize and performances. It uses SSD in the backed, so the hardware failure are very rare. The solid state drives will always provides the reliable performance over the traditional HDD’s.  Volumes is charged by the amount you provision in GB per month, prorated to the hour, until you release the storage. I/O is included in the price of the volumes, so you pay only for each GB of storage that you provision it.
Charges  = Pay only for the Number of GB that you have provision.

EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) Volumes:

What is different here from  the EBS general purpose SSD volumes ? If you need more than 10,000 IPOS , you need to choose “EBS provisioned IOPS SSD” volumes. It have capability to serve up to 20,000 IOPS which is much more faster than GP2 volumes.  On this volume , amazon charges for number of IOPS you make on this volume. This volume will fit for busy databases where it requires more IPOS .
Charges = Number of GB that you have provision + Per provisioned IOPS-month.

 EBS Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) Volumes:

It uses spinning disks in the backed and cost of the volume will be lesser than the SSD one. There is no additional charges for IOPS.  I/O is included in the price of the volumes, so you pay only for each GB of storage that you provision it. Its a low cost storage option and it can be used for Big data, Data warehousing , Log processing . You can’t use HDD volumes as boot volumes for any type of instances.
Charges  = Pay only for the Number of GB that you have provision.

EBS Cold HDD (sc1) Volume:

Its lowest cost storage volume where its used for infrequent data (Ex: File server, archival data ) access type.  I/O is included in the price of the volumes, so you pay only for each GB of storage that you provision it.
Charges  = Pay only for the Number of GB that you have provision.

Quick Summary:

AWS EBS storage Types

EBS Snapshots:

EBS snapshots is nothing but storing the EBS volume snapshot on S3 bucket. For the first time snapshot , it save the complete volume in S3 bucket. Amazon charges only for the incremental snapshots you store there after. If you have more data changes on the volume , the snapshot size will increase.  Copying the EBS snapshots is charged for the data transferred across the AWS regions.

EBS volumes and Snapshot

Hope you might get idea about the EBS storage and various type of EBS storage options are  available in Amazon Web services. In the upcoming article, we will demonstrate that how to launch the EC 2 instance in AWS cloud.