AWS Compute - EBS Volume (Snapshots and Volume Types)

EBS Volume Snapshots

Volumes are AZ specific means the volumes created in an AZ can be attached to EC2 instances which get created in that AZ

To utilize volumes in other AZ you need to create the snapshot of the volume and then create a new volume in the different AZ from the snapshot and attach to the instance which are available in different AZ

Copy the snapshots from one Region to another Region

When we create a volume from a snapshot then the size of volume can be increased but cannot be decreased.

We can create a root volume by taking a snapshot of the root volume of any instance.

EBS Volume Types

Amazon EBS provides the following volume types:
1. SSD
2. Provisioned IOPS SSD

3. Previous Generation HDD


1. Solid state drives (SSD)
Optimized for transactional workloads involving frequent read/write operations with small I/O size, where the dominant performance attribute is IOPS.
Solid state drives (SSD)
The SSD-backed volumes provided by Amazon EBS fall into these categories:

General Purpose SSD provides a balance of price and performance. We recommend these volumes for most workloads.

    gp3 (type of general purpose SSD): Durability:- 99.8% - 99.9% durability(0.1% - 0.2% annual failure rate)

    gp2 (type of general purpose SSD): Durability:- 99.8% - 99.9% durability(0.1% - 0.2% annual failure rate)

Use Case:

• Low-latency interactive apps
• Development and test environments

1. Volume Size:   1 GB - 16 TB
2. Max IOPS (input Output per Second) per volume (16 KiB I/O) : 16000
3. Max throughput (data transfer) per volume: For gp3: 1,000 MB/s and for gp2: 250 MB/s*
4. Amazon EBS Multi-attach(can attach multiple EBS volume): Not Supported
5. Boot volume (OS system volume): Supported

2. Provisioned IOPS SSD
Provides high performance for mission-critical, low-latency, or high-throughput workloads. io2 Block Express a.k.a io2, io1 are the types of Provisioned IOPS SSD.

Durability: 99.999% durability (0.001% annual failure rate), for io1 - 99.8% - 99.9% durability (0.1% - 0.2% annual failure rate)

Use Case:
Workloads that require:

• Sub-millisecond latency
• Sustained IOPS performance
• More than 64,000 IOPS or 1,000 MB/s of throughput

1. Volume Size : 4 GB - 64 TB, for io1 - 4 GB - 16 TB
2. Max IOPS per volume (16 KiB I/O) : 256,000 , for io1: 64,000
3. Max throughput per volume : 4000MB/s, for io1: 1000/MiB/s
4. Amazon EBS Multi-attach : Supported

3. Hard disk drives (HDD)
Optimized for large streaming workloads where the dominant performance attribute is throughput.

Use Cases:

• Big data
• Data warehouses
• Log processing

1. Volume: 125 GB - 16 TB


4. Previous generation
Hard disk drives that can be used for workloads with small datasets where data is accessed infrequently and performance is not of primary importance. We recommend that you consider a current generation volume type instead.

Use Case:

• Workloads where data is infrequently accessed

1. Volume size: 1GB to 1 TB