With providing the best solution for handling and using block storage at any scale, AWS offers Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). This refers to a high-performance block-storage service designed for operating with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in both throughput and transaction-intensive workloads at any scale. This includes a wide range of workloads like relational and non-relational databases, enterprise applications, containerized applications, big data analytics engines, file systems, and media workflows. However, to learn more about the EBS services, stay connected with the blog. In this, we will cover all the important areas of EBS and how to get started with it.
What is Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)?
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) offers a block-level storage volume for operating with EC2 instances. This comes with EBS volumes that act like raw, unformatted block devices. However, you can choose from six different volume types for balancing optimal price and performance. This helps in achieving single-digit-millisecond latency for high-performance database workloads like SAP HANA or gigabyte per second throughput for large, sequential workloads such as Hadoop.
Further, Amazon EBS is good for both database-style applications that depend on random reads and writes, and throughput-intensive applications performing long, continuous reads and write. To understand this better, let’s check out Elastic Block Store (EBS) benefits.
Benefits of AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS)
This service is useful for providing benefits in various areas like:
- Firstly, AWS EBS volumes are responsive for most demanding workloads, including mission-critical applications like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft products. This consists of SSD-backed. This can be considered as a volume designed for high-performance applications and a general-purpose volume providing strong price/performance for most workloads.
- Secondly, Amazon EBS architecture provides reliability for mission-critical applications. Moreover, EBS volumes help in protecting against failures by replicating within the Availability Zone (AZ).
- Thirdly, EBS includes six different volumes at many price points and performance benchmarks thus, allowing you for optimizing costs and investing in an accurate level of storage for your application requirements.
- Next, the Amazon EBS volumes are easy for creating, using, encrypting, and protecting. That is to say, the Elastic Volumes capability allows you for increasing storage, tuning performance up and down, and changing volume types without disturbing workloads. Further, EBS Snapshots allows for easily taking backups of your volumes for geographic protection of your data.
- Amazon EBS allows you to expand the storage without any disturbing critical workloads and creating applications that need as little as a single GB of storage.
- Lastly, EBS is created for securing data compliance. However, the newly-created EBS volumes can be encrypted by default with a single setting in your account. Further, EBS volumes provide encryption of data at rest, data in transit, and all volume backups.
Use cases of Amazon EBS
1. Enterprise applications
Amazon EBS offers high availability and high durability block storage for running mission-critical applications like Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, and VMware applications on VMware Cloud on AWS.
2. Relational databases
Amazon EBS scales with your performance requirments whether it is for gaming customers or for e-commerce transactions. This deploys databases like SAP HANA, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
3. Business continuity
Amazon EBS provides access for minimizing data loss and recovery time with the capability to regularly back up your data and log files over different geographic regions.
4. NoSQL databases
Amazon EBS volumes offer compatible and low-latency performance for NoSQL databases like MongoDB, and CouchDB.
5. Big data analytics engines
Amazon EBS provides data persistence, dynamic-performance adjustments, and the ability for detaching and reattaching volumes in order for resizing clusters for big data analytics engines like Hadoop and Spark.
6. File systems & media workflows
Amazon EBS provides easy scaling using the additional volumes for supporting growing file systems and the option to select four different volumes for optimizing price and performance.
Moving on to the features of EBS.
What are the features of Amazon EBS?
Amazon EBS offers a range of options for optimizing storage performance and cost for your workload. However, in the below section, we will talk about some of the top features of EBS.
1. Amazon EBS volume types
Amazon EBS offers multiple volume types used for optimizing storage performance and cost for a wide range of applications. However, the volume types have categories that includes:
- Firstly, Solid-state drives (SSD). These are optimized for transactional workloads involving frequent read/write operations with a small I/O size.
- Secondly, Hard disk drives (HDD). These are developed for large streaming workloads where the dominant performance attribute is throughput.
- Lastly, the Previous generation. Hard disk drives can be used for workloads with small datasets where data is accessed infrequently and performance is not of primary importance.
EBS Volume types:
1. Amazon EBS General Purpose Volumes
- Amazon EBS gp3 volumes refer to the latest generation of general-purpose SSD-based EBS volumes that allow customers for provisioning performance independent of storage capacity. Using gp3 volumes, customers can scale IOPS and throughput without any requirement of provisioning additional block storage capacity.
- Further, the new gp3 volumes are designed for providing a predictable, baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS regardless of the volume size. For example, in use cases where your application requires more performance than the baseline, you simply provision the IOPS or throughput you need, without having to add more capacity. gp3 volumes are ideal for a wide variety of applications at low cost, including MySQL, Cassandra, virtual desktops, and Hadoop analytics clusters.
2. Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS Volume
Provisioned IOPS volumes, backed by solid-state drives (SSDs) can be considered as the highest performance Elastic Block Store (EBS) storage volumes designed for your critical, IOPS-intensive, and throughput-intensive workloads that need low latency. Moreover, they can provide up to a maximum of 64,000 IOPS and 1,000 MB/s of throughput per volume, 4x more IOPS than general-purpose volumes. Further, it includes io2 volumes which are the latest generation of the Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes that are also designed for providing 100X higher durability.
3. Amazon EBS Throughput Optimized HDD volumes
Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) volumes offer low-cost magnetic storage that specifies performance based on throughput rather than IOPS. This volume type is best for frequently accessed, large, sequential I/O workloads like Amazon EMR, ETL, data warehouses, and log processing.
4. Amazon EBS Cold HDD Volumes
Cold HDD (sc1) volumes offer low-cost magnetic storage that specifies performance based on throughput rather than IOPS. With a lower throughput limit than Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) volumes. However, sc1 volumes are best for large, sequential cold-data workloads.
2. Amazon data lifecycle manager: EBS snapshots
Data Lifecycle Manager for EBS snapshots offers a simple, automated way for backing up data stored on EBS volumes by ensuring that EBS snapshots are built and deleted on a custom schedule. Moreover, there is no requirement for using scripts or other tools for complying with data backup and retention policies specific to your organization or industry. Further, it assures that snapshots are cleaned up regularly and keep costs under control.
3. Amazon EBS Snapshots
Amazon EBS provides the capabilities for saving point-in-time snapshots of your volumes to Amazon S3. However, the Amazon EBS Snapshots are placed incrementally. This states that only the blocks that have modified after your last snapshot are saved, and you are billed only for those changed blocks. Further, if you delete a snapshot then, you remove only the data not required by any other snapshot. All active snapshots contain all the information required for restoring the volume to the instant at which that snapshot was taken. Some key features of Amazon EBS Snapshots include:
- Firstly, direct read access of EBS Snapshots for reading data off snapshots and identifying differences between two EBS snapshots without any need for creating EBS volumes and EC2 instances.
- Secondly, creating EBS snapshots from any block storage.
- Thirdly, instant access to Amazon EBS volume data after creating volume from a snapshot.
- Next, easily sharing Amazon EBS Snapshots.
- Lastly, copying Amazon EBS Snapshots over AWS regions for leveraging multiple AWS regions for geographical expansion, data center migration, and disaster recovery.
4. Amazon EBS-Optimized instances
Customers can execute certain Amazon EC2 instance types as EBS-optimized instances for an additional low, hourly fee. However, EBS-optimized instances allow EC2 instances to completely using the IOPS provisioned on an EBS volume. Further, you can use the EBS-optimized instances with all Amazon EBS volume types.
5. Amazon EBS availability and durability
Amazon EBS volumes are designed for providing high availability, reliability, and durability. Without any additional charge, Amazon EBS volume data is replicated over multiple servers in an Availability Zone for preventing the loss of data from the failure of any single component. Moreover, it offers a higher durability volume (io2) for providing full durability with an annual failure rate (AFR) of 0.001%.
6. Amazon EBS encryption and AWS Identity and Access Management
Amazon EBS encryption provides smooth encryption of EBS data volumes, boot volumes, and snapshots by removing the need for creating and managing a secure key management infrastructure. EBS encryption allows data at rest security by encrypting your data volumes, boot volumes, and snapshots using Amazon-managed keys or keys you build and manage using the AWS Key Management Service (KMS). Further, the encryption happens on the servers that host EC2 instances, providing encryption of data as it moves between EC2 instances and EBS data and boot volumes.
7. Amazon EBS Multi-Attach
Customers can authorize Multi-Attach on an EBS Provisioned IOPS io2 or io1 volume for allowing a volume to be concurrently linked to up to sixteen Nitro-based EC2 instances inside the same Availability Zone. However, Multi-Attach makes it easier for achieving higher application availability for applications that control storage consistency from multiple writers. Further, there is no additional fee for enabling Multi-Attach.
Its’ time to get started with Amazon EBS. In the next section, we will learn how to create an Amazon EBS Volume.
Creating an Amazon EBS volume
You can create an Amazon EBS volume and then link it to an EC2 instance in the same Availability Zone. However, if you created an encrypted EBS volume then, you can only attach it to supported instance types.
Procedures for creating a volume:
- Firstly, create and attach EBS volumes when you begin instances by specifying a block device mapping.
- Secondly, create an empty EBS volume and link it to a running instance.
- Lastly, create an EBS volume from a previously created snapshot and link it to a running instance.
1. Creating an empty volume
Empty volumes get maximum performance when they are available and do not need initialization. However, we will create an empty EBS volume using the console:
- Firstly, open the Amazon EC2 console.
- Secondly, select the Region for creating your volume from the navigation bar.
- Thirdly, choose ELASTIC BLOCK STORE, Volumes in the navigation pane.
- Fourthly, select Create Volume.
- Then, choose a volume type.
- Next, enter the size of the volume, in GiB.
- Now, enter the maximum number of input/output operations per second (IOPS) that the volume should offer. Here, you can only specify IOPS for gp3, io1, and io2 volumes.
- After that, enter the throughput that the volume should offer, in MiB/s.
- Next, select the Availability Zone in which to create the volume. However, an EBS volume must be linked to an EC2 instance that is within the same Availability Zone as the volume.
- Then, select Create Volume.
- Lastly, for using a new volume, attach it to an instance, format it, and mount it.
2. Creating a volume from a snapshot
Volumes created from snapshots load casually in the background. That is to say, there is no requirement of waiting for all of the data to transfer from Amazon S3 to your EBS volume before the instance can begin accessing an attached volume and all its data. However, the new EBS volumes that are created from encrypted snapshots are automatically encrypted. Now, we will create a volume from a snapshot using the console:
- Firstly, open the Amazon EC2 console.
- Secondly, select the Region that your snapshot is located in from the navigation bar.
- Thirdly, for using the snapshot to create a volume in a different region, copy your snapshot to the new Region.
- Next, choose ELASTIC BLOCK STORE, Volumes in the navigation pane.
- Now, select Create Volume.
- After that, choose a volume type.
- Then, start typing the ID or description of the snapshot from which you are restoring the volume. You can choose it from the list of suggested options.
- Next, validate the default size of the snapshot meets your requirements or enter the size of the volume, in GiB.
- After that, enter the maximum number of input/output operations per second (IOPS) that the volume should offer.
- Then, enter the throughput that the volume should offer, in MiB/s.
- Now, select the Availability Zone in which to create the volume. And, select Create Volume.
- Lastly, for using a new volume, attach it to an instance and mount it.
- However, if you created a volume that is larger than the snapshot then, you must extend the file system on the volume to take advantage of the extra space.
3. Attaching the volume to an instance
For attaching an EBS volume to an instance using the console:
- Firstly, open the Amazon EC2 console.
- Secondly, choose Elastic Block Store, Volumes in the navigation pane.
- Thirdly, select an available volume and choose Actions, Attach Volume.
- Then, start typing the name or ID of the instance. However, you can select the instance from the list of options.
- After that, you can keep the suggested device name, or type a different supported device name.
- Next, select Attach.
- Lastly, connect to your instance and mount the volume.
Amazon EBS pricing
With Amazon EBS, you only have to pay for what you utilize. However, the pricing for Amazon EBS volumes are:
Volume Type
1. General Purpose SSD (gp3) – Storage
$0.08/GB-month
2. General Purpose SSD (gp3) – IOPS
3,000 IOPS free and $0.005/provisioned IOPS-month over 3,000
3. General Purpose SSD (gp3) – Throughput
125 MB/s free. $0.04/provisioned MB/s-month over 125
4. General Purpose SSD (gp2) Volumes
$0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage
5. Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) – Storage
$0.125/GB-month
6. Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) – IOPS
Firstly, $0.065/provisioned IOPS-month up to 32,000 IOPS
Secondly, $0.046/provisioned IOPS-month from 32,001 to 64,000 IOPS
Lastly, $0.032/provisioned IOPS-month for greater than 64,000 IOPS†
7. Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) Volumes
$0.125 per GB-month of provisioned storage AND $0.065 per provisioned IOPS-month
8. Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) Volumes
$0.045 per GB-month of provisioned storage
9. Cold HDD (sc1) Volumes
$0.015 per GB-month of provisioned storage
Final Words
Above we have covered the overview, features, benefits, and how to get started with the AWS Elastic Block Store. This block-storage service is useful for operating Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for both throughput and transaction-intensive workloads at any scale. Moreover, with gaining the trust of top companies Adobe, Unilever, and Infor, it is providing solutions for managing costs, enterprise products, and moving snapshots across regions. To understand more accurately, use the AWS documentation and go through the blog for learning the various areas of Amazon EBS. At last, feel free to share your learning experience and comment if there is any query/doubts.
