What is AWS EBS?

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is an easy-to-use, scalable, high-performance block-storage service designed for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

AWS EBS Volume types

Amazon EBS provides the following volume types: Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 Block Express, io2, and io1), General Purpose SSD (gp3 and gp2), Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) and Cold HDD (sc1). 

AWS EBS Volume types Comparision

Following is the Comparision of AWS Volume types across various features

AWS EBS – General purpose SSD (gp3 and gp2) volumes

General-purpose volumes are backed by solid-state drives (SSDs) and are suitable for a broad range of transactional workloads, virtual desktops, medium sized single instance databases, latency sensitive interactive applications, dev/test environments, and boot volumes.

AWS EBS General Purpose SSD has two volume types – gp3 and gp2. Following is the Comparision of General purpose –aws gp3 vs aws gp2

AWS EBS – Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 Block Express, io2 & io1) volumes

AWS EBS Provisioned IOPS volume types are Ideal for critical applications and databases requiring sustained IOPS.

AWS EBS Provisioned IOPS has three volume types – io1,io2,io2 Block express . Following is the Comparision of Provisioned IOPS – io2 vs io1 vs io2 Block express

AWS EBS – Throughput optimized HDD (st1) ,Cold HDD (sc1) Volumes

ST1 is backed by hard disk drives (HDDs) and is ideal for frequently accessed, throughput intensive workloads with large datasets and large I/O sizes, such as MapReduce, Kafka, log processing, data warehouse, and ETL workloads. 

SC1 is backed by hard disk drives (HDDs) and provides the lowest cost per GB of all EBS volume types. It is ideal for less frequently accessed workloads with large, cold datasets.

AWS EBS Elastic Volumes

Elastic Volumes is a feature that allows you to easily adapt your volumes as the needs of your applications change. Elastic Volumes allows you to dynamically increase capacity, tune performance, and change the type of any new or existing current generation volume with no downtime or performance impact.

AWS EBS Data Lifecycle Manager

Data Lifecycle Manager for EBS snapshots provides a simple, automated way to back up data stored on EBS volumes by ensuring that EBS snapshots are created and deleted on a custom schedule. 

Amazon EBS Snapshots

Amazon EBS provides the ability to save point-in-time snapshots of your volumes to Amazon S3. Amazon EBS Snapshots are stored incrementally: only the blocks that have changed after your last snapshot are saved, and you are billed only for the changed blocks.

The following are key features of Amazon EBS Snapshots:

• Direct read access of EBS Snapshots – Customers can use EBS direct APIs for Snapshots to read data off snapshots and identify differences between two EBS snapshots without needing to create EBS volumes and EC2 instances.
• Creating EBS snapshots from any block storage – Using EBS direct APIs, you can create EBS snapshots directly from any block storage data, regardless of where it resides, including data on-premises, and quickly recover into EBS volumes.
• Instant full performance on EBS volumes restored from snapshots – For an additional hourly charge, you can enable Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) capability for low latency access to data restored from snapshots. 
• Sharing Amazon EBS Snapshots – Amazon EBS Snapshots’ shareability makes it easy for you to share data with your co-workers or others in the AWS community. 
• Copying Amazon EBS Snapshots across AWS regions – Amazon EBS’s ability to copy snapshots across AWS regions makes it easier to leverage multiple AWS regions for geographical expansion, data center migration and disaster recovery.
• EBS Snapshots Archive – EBS Snapshots Archive is a lower storage cost tier which stores a full copy of your point-in-time EBS Snapshots.

AWS EBS Pricing

With Amazon EBS, you pay only for what you use. For more details about AWS EBS Pricing, refer to our blog post – http://www.cloudinfonow.com/aws-ebs-pricing/