Elastic Block Store (EBS) Cheat Sheet

  • Distributed block storage (i.e. like hard drive or SAN)
  • 4 Volume Types
    • SSD
      • General Purpose (gp)
      • Provisioned IOPS (io)
    • HDD
      • Throughput Optimized (st)
      • Cold (sc)
  • Type Details
    • General Purpose
      • Minimum 100 IOPS
      • Maximum 16,000 IOPS per volume
      • 3 IOPS / GB
      • Maximum 250MB / second per volume
    • Provisioned IOPS
      • Expensive
      • For high IO + high throughput, critical needs, e.g. data warehouse, database
      • Purchase number of IOPS / month
      • Maximum 64,000 IOPS per volume
      • Maximum 1,000MB / second per volume
    • Throughput Optimized
      • Cheap
      • For linear reading and writing, e.g. media streaming
      • Maximum 500MB / second per volume
    • Cold
      • Cheapest
      • For infrequent access to large chunks of data, e.g. backup
      • Maximum 250MB / second per volume
  • Snapshot
    • Online snapshot, snapshots can be done in real time without unmounting the volume; for root volumes it is better to take offline snapshots
    • Incremental, initial snapshot only contains used data, subsequent snapshots only contain changed data
    • Versioned, each snapshot has an ID and can create volume from any snapshot
    • Automation, creation, deletion of snapshots can be automated using Data Life Cycle Manager
  • Limits
    • Maximum 16TB per volume
    • Maximum 80,000 IOPS per instance
    • Maximum 2,375MB / second per instance