Amazon EBS gp3: Provision performance independent of storage capacity

Amazon EBS gp3: Provision performance independent of storage capacity

January 13, 2021 / Nirav Shah

“AWS announced the latest change in Dec-2020 about Amazon EBS gp3 volume.”

Before we discuss this new change, Let’s understand about EBS and volume type.

As per AWS’s official documentation, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is an easy-to-use, high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon EC2 instances for both throughput and transaction-intensive workloads of all sizes.

Elastic Block storage service in which you can scale up and scale down it. It is a persistent storage device.

You can use it as a file system for databases, application hosting and storage perpses.

One EBS volume can only be attached to one instance or database.

Elastic Block Storage

1. Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is AWS’s block-level, persistent local storage solution for Amazon EC2.
2. You can use Raid 1 (or 0 or 10) with multiple block storages.
3. It is really fast and cheap
4. You can store up to 16TB data per storage on SSDs.
5. You can snapshot an EBS (while it’s still running) for backup reasons.
6. You need an EC2 instance to attach it to.
7. Amazon EBS pricing: General Purpose SSD (gp2) $0.10 per GB-month.
8. Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) $0.125 per GB-month ($0.065 per provisioned IOPS-month) Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) $0.045 per GB-month.
9. Cold HDD (sc1) volumes $0.025 per GB-month.

Amazon EBS volume types

Amazon EBS volume types are divided into two main categories:

• SSD-backed volumes are to make best possible use for IOPS, these are best for workloads involving frequent read/write operations
• HDD-backed volumes are to make best possible use throughput. this Cannot include boot volumes.

Within each of those groups are two options. The default type is General Purpose SSD (gp2), and there are 3 others available:

• General Purpose SSD (gp2) – general-purpose, balances price and performance.
  • Use for: Most workloads such as virtual desktops, dev and test environments, and low-latency interactive apps.
• Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) – This is High-Performance SSD volume used for critical low-latency or high-throughput workloads.
  • Use for Mission-critical applications, large database workloads such as MongoDB, Microsoft SQL Server, Cassandra, Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
• Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) – Low-cost HDD volume for frequently accessed workloads with high throughput.
  • Use for Streaming workloads, big data, data warehouses, log processing.
    Cold HDD (sc1) – lowest cost HDD volume for less-frequently accessed workloads
  • Use for Throughput-oriented storage for large volumes of data that is infrequently accessed

Now let’s understand why AWS launch this gp3 as new volume type in EBS

• MySQL,Hadoop clusters and Cassandra require high performance.
• So the client wants to meet the performance requirements of these types of applications and also does not want to pay for more storage volumes than they need.

Now Let’s understand about gp3:

1. Volume Type: EBS General Purpose SSD (gp3)
2. Short Description: General Purpose SSD volume that balances price performance for a wide variety of transactional workloads
3. Use Cases: Virtual desktops, medium-sized single instance databases such as MSFT SQL Server and Oracle DB, low-latency interactive apps, dev & test, boot volumes
4. API Name: gp3
5. Volume Size: 1 GB – 16 TB
6. Durability: 99.8% – 99.9% durability
7. Max IOPS/Volume: 16,000
>Max Throughput*/Volume: 1000 MB/s
8. Max IOPS/Instance: 260,000
9. Max Throughput/Instance: 7,500 MB/s
10. Latency: single-digit millisecond
11. Storage Price: $0.08/GB-month
12. Provisioned Performance Price: 3,000 IOPS free and $0.005/provisioned IOPS-month over 3,000 IOPS; 125 MB/s free and $0.04/provisioned MB/s-month over 125 MiBps
13. Dominant Performance Attribute: $/IOPS

If you want to Switch from gp2 to gp3

• Using Elastic Volumes allows you to easily change the volume type,and this will not interrupting your Amazon EC2 instances.
• At the time of creating WBS volume choose gp3
• New AWS customers receive 30GiB of gp3 storage at no charge for 12 months.

Conclusion

So that’s why AWS comes up with EBS gp3, a new type of SSD EBS volume.

In which you can provision performance apart from storage capacity, and offer a 20% lower price than existing gp2 volume types.

The new gp3 is the 7th variation of EBS volume types. You can independently increase IOPS and throughput without having to provision additional block storage capacity, paying only for the resources they need.