In this article, we will Compare EBS volume types and EBS volume pricing:
When you look into/plan to buy storage devices there is a certain metric that you want to have a look before you buy a storage devices
Performance Metrics in Storage Device:
- Storage Device is a piece of equipment on which information can be stored
- Common disk performance metrics are:
- Input / Output operations per second (IOPS)
- Throughput (MB/s or MiB/s)
- Response time (ms)
Various Operating system and Cloud providers are now following new standardize units for storage devices i.e., KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB. This is something which we need to remember.
EBS Volume Types:
- EBS provides different volume types which differ in performance and price
- This gives flexibility for the user to design and implement optimal EBS solution.
Depending upon our use case we can select one of these types and the pricing and performance ratio may vary depending upon the volume type we choose.
Compare SSD Based Drives
| General Purpose SSD | Provisioned IOPS SSD |
| Used for general purpose workloads which balances the price and performance for normal workloads | Highest performance SSD volume designed for mission-critical application workloads. |
| Typically used for test, dev and prod environment for normal workloads. | Typically used for large database workloads like MongoDB, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, MySQL etc. |
| Volume size from 1 GiB to 16 TiB | Volume size from 4 GiB to 16 TiB |
| Performance: Max 10,000 IOPS, 160 MiB/sec throughput | Performance: Max 20,000 IOPS, 320 MiB/sec |
| In AWS it is named as “gp2” EBS type | In AWS it is named as “io1” EBS type |
Compare HDD Based Drives
| Throughput Optimized HDD | Cold HDD |
| Low-Cost HDD designed for frequently accessed throughput intensive workload | Lowest Cost HDD designed for less frequently access workloads |
| Used for an application like Data Warehouse, Big Data, Log processing etc. | Used in scenarios were lowest storage cost is important. |
| Volume size from 500 GiB to 16 TiB | Volume size from 500 GiB to 16 TiB |
| Performance: Max 500 IOPS, 500 MiB/sec | Performance: Max 250 IOPS, 250 MiB/sec |
| In AWS it is named as “st1” EBS type | In AWS it is named as “sc1” EBS type |
Note: you cannot use these drives as a boot volume, you cannot install Operating System on top of these Drives
Magnetic (It is previous Generation Drive)
| Volume Type | EBS Magnetic |
| Use case | Workloads where data is infrequently accessed |
| Volume Size | 1 GiB to 1 TiB |
| Max Performance | Performance: Max 40 – 200 IOPS, 40-90 MiB/s |
This topic Compare EBS volume types and EBS volume pricing.
Let’s take a simple scenario for choosing EBS types:
In an Organization, there is critical production database server which receives a lot of connections, and your task is to optimize the performance. What type of EBS volume will you suggest?
- General Purpose SSD
- Throughput Optimized
- Provisioned IOPS (answer)
- Cold HDD
