AWS Storage Guide
EBS Volume Types
Understanding the architecture of gp3, io2, and st1 to optimize cost and performance.
The Ingredients of Performance
The core metrics that define EBS volume capability
IOPS
Input/Output Operations Per Second. Measures the speed of small read/write requests.
Throughput
Measured in MiB/s. Defines how much data can be transferred in a single second.
Capacity
Volume size in GiB/TiB. In older types, performance was tied strictly to size.
Latency
The time taken for a single I/O request to be completed (measured in ms).
Volume Selection Logic
Mapping workloads to the correct storage architecture
Workload Demand
gp3
“The General Purpose SSD”
- Decoupled IOPS from Size
- 20% lower price than gp2
- Baseline 3,000 IOPS
BEST FOR: VIRTUAL DESKTOPS, BOOT VOLUMES
io2
“The Provisioned IOPS SSD”
- Sub-millisecond latency
- 99.999% Durability
- Up to 256,000 IOPS
BEST FOR: SAP HANA, ORACLE, CRITICAL DBs
st1
“Throughput Optimized HDD”
- Low-cost HDD storage
- Max 500 MiB/s throughput
- High sequential access
BEST FOR: BIG DATA, LOG PROCESSING, DATA WAREHOUSING