Amazon Elastic Block Store

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).^[1] It is one of the two block-storage options offered by AWS, with the other being the EC2 Instance Store.^[2]

Amazon Elastic Block Store

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.^[3]

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.^[4] As of March 2018 30 GB of free space was included in the free tier of Amazon Web Services 2017.^[5]

Volume types

The following table shows use cases and performance characteristics of current generation EBS volumes:^[6]

	Solid state drives (SSD)			Hard disk drives (HDD)
Volume type	EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) (since 2012) [7]	EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2)[a]	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[b]/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

1. Default volume type
2. io1/gp2 based on 16 KiB I/O size, st1/sc1 based on 1 MiB I/O size

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.^[8]
• 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.^[9]
• 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.^[10]

See also

• Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)
• Amazon S3