AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

EBS volumes are highly available and reliable storage volumes that can be attached to any running instance that is in the same Availability Zone. EBS volumes that are attached to an EC2 instance are exposed as storage volumes that persist independently from the life of the instance.

The types of EBS volumes are:

• Magnetic
• General Purpose (SSD)
• Provisioned IOPS (SSD)

Use cases are:

IOPS & Volumes sizes used in General Purposes SSDs

IOPS are input/output operations per second. AWS Elastic Block Storage measures each I/O operation per second as one IOPS. General purpose SSD have a baseline of 3 IOPS per GiB of volume size. Maximum volume size can go upto 16 TiB. Maximum IOPS size is up to 10,000 IOPS total and after that you have to go to Provisioned IOPS SSDs.

For instance:

Say you have 100 GiB volume and so you will get 3 IOPS per GiB so you have total 3 X 100 = 300 IOPS. Point to remember is that you can burst up to 3000 IOPS on this volume if you want to, the burst would be 2700 (3000-300) IOPS to be exact. You can achieve this using I/O credits.

Similarly, if you have 500 GiB volume and so you will get 3 IOPS per GiB so you have total 3 X 500 = 1500 IOPS. Point to remember is that you can burst up to 3000 IOPS on this volume if you want to, the burst would be 1500 (3000-1500) IOPS to be exact.  

I/O Credits

When you volume requires more than baseline performance I/O level, it simply uses I/O credits in the credit balance to burst upto the maximum of 3000 IOPS.

Each volume receives a initial I/O credit balance of 5,400,00 I/O credits. This is a good amount to sustain 3000 IOPS burst up performance for 30 minutes. When you are not going over your provisioned I/O level you will be earning credits.

EBS is recommended when data must be quickly accessible and requires long-term persistence. EBS volumes are particularly well-suited for use as the primary storage for file systems, databases, or for any applications that require fine granular updates and access to raw, unformatted, block-level storage. 

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