Amazon Elastic Block Store
{{Short description|Cloud-based raw storage service}}
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File:AWS Simple Icons Storage Amazon EBS.svg
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).{{Cite web|url=https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHAP_Storage.html|title=DB Instance Storage - Amazon Relational Database Service|website=docs.aws.amazon.com}} It is one of the two block-storage options offered by AWS, with the other being the EC2 Instance Store.{{Cite web | url=https://riyanchristy.goseeq.net/ec2-instance-store-vs-ebs/ | title=EC2 Instance Store vs EBS | date=May 31, 2022 | access-date=June 16, 2022 | archive-date=June 16, 2022 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220616144124/https://riyanchristy.goseeq.net/ec2-instance-store-vs-ebs/ | url-status=dead }}
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).
Use case
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.{{cite web |url= https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/volume_constraints.html |title=Constraints on the size and configuration of an EBS volume |work= Amazon Web Services Documentation |url-status= live |access-date= Sep 11, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171011224921/http://docs.aws.amazon.com:80/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/volume_constraints.html |archive-date=2017-10-11 }}
EBS volumes are built on replicated back end storage, so that the failure of a single component will not cause data loss.
History
EBS was introduced by Amazon in August 2008.{{cite web |url= http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/08/amazon-elastic.html |title=Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - Bring Us Your Data |work= Amazon Web Services Blog |date= August 20, 2008 |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20110328011236/http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/08/amazon-elastic.html| archive-date= March 28, 2011 |url-status= live |access-date= May 31, 2013 }} As of March 2018 30 GB of free space was included in the free tier of Amazon Web Services 2017.{{Cite web|url=https://aws.amazon.com/free/|title=AWS Free Tier|website=Amazon Web Services, Inc.}}
Volume types
The following table shows use cases and performance characteristics of current generation EBS volumes:{{Cite web|url=https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/details/|title=Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) – Details – Amazon Web Services (AWS)|website=Amazon Web Services, Inc.|language=en-US|access-date=2017-12-31}}
| class="wikitable"
! ! colspan="3" |Solid state drives (SSD) ! colspan="2" |Hard disk drives (HDD) |
| Volume type
|EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) (since 2012) {{Cite web|url=https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2012/07/31/announcing-provisioned-iops-for-amazon-ebs/|title=Announcing Provisioned IOPS for Amazon EBS|website=Amazon Web Services, Inc.}} |EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2){{efn|Default volume type}} |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{{efn|io1/gp2 based on 16 KiB I/O size, st1/sc1 based on 1 MiB I/O size}}/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-month $0.065/provisioned IOPS |$0.10/GB-month |$0.08/GB-month $0.005/provisioned IOPS over 3000 |$0.045/GB-month |$0.025/GB-month |
| Dominant performance attribute
|IOPS |IOPS |IOPS |MB/s |MB/s |
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Features
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.{{cite web |url= https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/features/ |title=Amazon EBS Features |work=Amazon Web Services |url-status= live |access-date= Sep 11, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180920182438/https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/features/ |archive-date=2018-09-20 }}
- 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.{{cite web |url=https://sandhill.com/article/7-little-known-amazon-ebs-features-you-should-be-using/ |title=7 Little-Known Amazon EBS Features You Should Be Using |work=Sand Hill| date=January 17, 2020 |url-status= live |access-date= Sep 11, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200127200915/http://sandhill.com:80/article/7-little-known-amazon-ebs-features-you-should-be-using/ |archive-date=2020-01-27 }}
- 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.{{cite web |url= https://cloud.netapp.com/blog/ebs-volumes-5-lesser-known-functions |title=AWS EBS: A Complete Guide and Five Functions You Should Start Using |work= Cloud Central Blog| date=June 4, 2019|url-status= live |access-date= Sep 11, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170726122530/https://cloud.netapp.com/blog/ebs-volumes-5-lesser-known-functions |archive-date=2017-07-26 }}
See also
References
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External links
- [http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ Amazon Elastic Block Store main page]
{{Amazon}}
{{Cloud computing}}