Aws EBS Volume Types-Aws EBS Volumes Tutorial

EBS stands for Elastic Block Storage. There are various types of EBS volumes which an administrator of the system can use according to the need of application or infrastructure of the product. There are different types of storage systems available in the AWS environment such as EFS, S3, and many more of which EBS is one of the storage systems available. The EBS volume is a local persistent volume attached to the computing machine that is EC2.

Types of EBS Volume’s

This type of storage system are mainly fall into the two different pieces that is.

SSD-backed volumes:

These types of volumes are optimized IOPS, which are best for the workload that involves often write/read operations with small I/O size.

HDD-backed volumes:

These types of volumes are used for throughput for large/huge streaming workload. hdd volumes used where through is a better performance measure than IOPS.

As mentioned above to main categories, there are several option lies beyond this, i.e. they are further categorized as mentioned below.

SSD-backed volume category

General Purpose SSD(gp2):  It is a type of volume that balances the price and performance of the wide variety of workloads.

Use Case:  It is mostly used in dev/test and most workload which are in the initial phase of development.  Also used for virtual desktops, and  low-latency applications.

Provisioned IOPS SSD(io1/io2):

It is one of the best and highest-performance SSD volumes for mission-critical low latency or high throughput workload. It is highly durable as AWS states it provides durability upto 99.999 percent.

Use Case: it is used where critical business applications are running the required sustained IOPS performance, or more than 16,000 IOPS or 250 MiB/s of throughput per volume. It is also used for large database workloads such as MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Cassandra.

HDD-Backed volume category

General Purpose SSD(gp2):  It is a type of volume that balances the price and performance of the wide variety of workloads.

Use Case:  It is mostly used in dev/test and most workload which are in the initial phase of development.  Also used for virtual desktops.  Use for low-latency applications.
General purposes are fairly the same for both kinds and hence they are the same for initial purpose to use.

Throughput Optimized HDD(st1): It is a type of volume which is a low cost HDD volume for frequency access workloads and with high throughput. This volume comes with low cost magnetic storage that defines performance in terms of throughput rather than IOPS.

Use Case: This type of volume is good for large, sequential workloads such ETL, data warehouse, Amazon EMR, Big data ANd log processing.

Cold Hdd(sc1) volume: It is a type of volume which is loss-cost HDD volume for less-frequently accessed workloads. cold hdd volumes are cheaper than st1 volume type but unlink it, it is used for accessing less-often use workloads.

If you require infrequent access to your workload and at same time looking for cost-effective solutions then you can opt for this sc1 block storage.

Use Case: It is used where throughput-oriented approach is necessary for infrequently access of large data.

Apart from this Magnetic(Standard) volumes are also there, these magnetic volumes are backed by magnetic drives which are suited for workloads which have infrequent access and of small size.

That’s all about Types of aws EBS volumes.