Blog > Introduction to AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS)
The AWS Elastic Block Store is a distributed, replicated block data store optimized for consistency, low latency, read and write access from EC2 instances. Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block-level storage volumes for Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Each Amazon EC2 volume is automatically replicated within its availability zone to protect users from component failure to offer high availability and durability. It is specifically designed for service availability.
Why AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) for Enterprise
It is a disk volume that can be attached to the EC2 instance. It is well suited for use as the primary storage for a file system, database, or any applications requiring regular updates and access to raw, unformatted, and block-level storage. EBS has the performance mechanism optimized at the base level. EBS provides highly available, highly reliable, and strange volumes.
- It is particularly suited for the organization with applications that require a database, file system, or access to raw block-level storage.
- Created in a particular availability zone and can be from 1 GB to 1 TB in size.
- Once the user creates the volume, it can attach to any Amazon EC2 instance in the same availability zone.
- Amazon EBS provides the ability to back up point-in-time snapshots of user data to Amazon S3 for a durable recovery.
- Amazon Elastic Block Store snapshots are incremental backups; only the blocks can change since the last snapshot will be saved.
Elastic Block Store Volume: Elastic Block Store volume is an additional feature that supports managing data easily. A volume can only be attached to one instance at a time, but many volumes can be attached to a single instance.
Elastic Block Store Snapshot: Snapshot can also be used to instantiate multiple new volumes, expand the size of a volume, or move volume across availability zones; snapshots can be shared using AWS Management Console or API calls.
Elastic Block Store (EBS) Features
- EBS allows its users to create storage volumes from 1 GB to 1 TB
- Elastic Block Store is for the persistent storage
- Elastic Block Store has high performance and high reliability
- Storage volumes behave like a raw, unformatted block device
- Each storage volume of EBS is automatically replicated within the same availability zone
Types and Performance Measures of Elastic Block Volumes
Elastic Block Store Provisioned IOPS SSD (I01)
This is the best SSD back volume. It is the highest performance EBS storage option designed for critical I/O intensive database and application workloads. It is a high-performance SSD back storage type and provides good throughput per volume.
Elastic Block Store General Purpose SSD (GP2)
It is the general-purpose SSD; the GP2 volume is the default EBS volume type for Amazon EC2 instances, suitable for a broad range of translation workloads, including dev-test environments, low latency, interactive application, and boot volumes. It provides a consistent baseline performance of up to 3 IOS per GB.
Throughput Optimized HDO (ST1)
Hard drives back ST1 is ideal for frequently accessed throughput intensive workloads, with a large dataset and large I/O sizes such as MapReduce, Kafka, Log processing, data warehouse, and ETL workloads. HDO also provides up to 250 Mbps per second of throughput per volume. It is a low-cost hard drive volume design for frequently accessed throughput-intensive workloads; it is ideal for large size companies.
Mostly it is used for big data, data warehouses, and log processing. An enterprise can use this when working with MapReduce, Kafka, log processing, warehouse, and ETL. The performance aspect will provide a baseline throughput of 40 Mbps per terabyte and a maximum throughput of 500 Mbps per volume.
Cold HDD (SC1)
SC1 is backed by hard disk drives (HDDs) and provides the lowest cost per GB of all EBS volume types. Enterprises can adapt this for less frequently accessed workloads with an extensive cold database. Its volume can burst up to 80 MB per second per terabyte.
Author: SVCIT Editorial
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