EBS Volume Types¶

EBS Volumes come in 6 types
- gp2 / gp3 (SSD): General purpose SSD volume that balances price and performance for a wide variety of workloads
- io1 / io2 (SSD): Highest performance SSD volume for mission-critical low latency or high-throughput workloads
- st1 (HDD): Low cost HDD volume designed for frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads
- sc1 (HDD): Lowest cost HDD volume designed for less frequently accessed workloads
EBS Voluimes are characterized in Size | Thoughput | IOPS
When in doubt always consult the AWS documentation
Only gp2/gp3 and io1/io2 can be used as boot volumes

General Purpose SSD¶

Cost efective storage, low latency
System boot volumes, Virtual desktops, Development and test environments
1 GiB - 16 TiB
gp3:
- Baseline of 3000 IOPS and throughput of 125MiB/s
- Can increase IOPS up to 16000 and throughput up to 1000MiB/s independently
gp2:
- Small gp2 volumes can burst IOPS to 3000
- Size of the volume and IOPS are linked, max IOPS is 16,000
- 3 IOPS per GB, means at 5334 GB we are at the max IOPS

Critical business application with sustained IOPS performance
Or applications that need more than 16000 IOPS
Great for database workloads (sensitive to storage performance and consistency)
io1/io2 (4GiB-16TiB):
- Max PIOPS: 64000 for Nitro EC2 instances & 32000 for other
- Can increase PIOPS independently from storage size
- io2 have more durability and more IOPS per GiB (at the same price as io1)
io2 Block Express (4 GiB - 64TiB):
- sub-millisecond latency
- max PIOPS: 256000 with an IOPS:GiB ratio of 1,000:1
Support EBS multi-attach

Cannot be a boot volume
125 MiB to 16 TiB
Throughput optimized HDD (st1)
- Big Data, Data Warehouses, Log Processing
- Max throughput 500MiB/s - max IOPS 500
Cold HDD (sc1):
- For data that is infrequently accessed
- Scenarios where lowest cost is important
- Max throughput 250MiB/s - Max IOPS 250