Last fall at its re:Invent Conference, Amazon announced it would soon make available larger and faster Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes for developers and storage admins as part of Amazon Web Services. On March 19, Amazon followed through on its promise.
EBS provides persistent block-level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Each EBS volume is automatically replicated to protect users from component failure. Using EBS, users can scale usage up or down as needed while paying for only for only the storage they provision.
EBC comes in two flavors:
General Purpose (solid-stage disks), launched last June, are the default EBS volume type for Amazon EC2 instances and are suitable for a broad range of bursty workloads, including small- to medium-sized databases (either NoSQL or relational), dev and test environments, and boot volumes. Users can create volumes that store up to 16TB and provide up to 10,000 baseline IOPS (up from the previous limits of 1TB and 3,000 baseline IOPS).
Provisioned IOPS (SSD), introduced in 2012, are designed for I/O-intensive workloads that require consistent performance, such as relational and NoSQL databases. Users can now create volumes that store up to 16 TB and provide up to 20,000 Provisioned IOPS (up from 1 TB and 4,000 Provisioned IOPS).
Both SSD volume types are designed to offer single-digit millisecond latencies and five nines (99.999%) availability, Amazon marketing executive Jeff Barr wrote in the company blog.
Newly- created volumes will transfer data more than twice as fast, with a maximum throughput of 160 MBps for General Purpose (SSD) and 320 MBps for Provisioned IOPS (SSD), Barr said.
With more room to store data and the ability to get to it even more rapidly, users can now run more demanding, larger-scale workloads without having to stripe multiple volumes together or to do a complex workaround when it comes time to create and coordinate snapshots. Admins can just create the volume and turn their attention to data and the application, the company said.