Amazon Elastic Block Store

Last updated
Amazon Elastic Block Store AWS Simple Icons Storage Amazon EBS.svg
Amazon Elastic Block Store

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides raw block-level storage that can be attached to Amazon EC2 instances and is used by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). [1] It is one of the two block-storage options offered by AWS, with the other being the EC2 Instance Store. [2]

Contents

Amazon EBS provides a range of options for storage performance and cost. These options are divided into two major categories: SSD-backed storage for transactional workloads, such as databases and boot volumes (performance depends primarily on IOPS), and disk-backed storage for throughput intensive workloads, such as MapReduce and log processing (performance depends primarily on MB/s).

Use case

In a typical use case, using EBS would include formatting the device with a filesystem and mounting it. EBS supports advanced storage features, including snapshotting and cloning. As of September 2020, EBS volumes can be up to 2 TiB in size using the MBR partitioning scheme, and up to 16 TiB using the GPT partitioning scheme. [3]

EBS volumes are built on replicated back end storage, so that the failure of a single component will not cause data loss.

History

EBS was introduced by Amazon in August 2008. [4] As of March 2018 30 GB of free space was included in the free tier of Amazon Web Services 2017. [5]

Volume types

The following table shows use cases and performance characteristics of current generation EBS volumes: [6]

Solid state drives (SSD)Hard disk drives (HDD)
Volume typeEBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) (since 2012) [7] EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2) [lower-alpha 1] EBS General Purpose SSD (gp3)Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)Cold HDD (sc1)
Short descriptionHighest performance SSD volume designed for latency-sensitive transactional workloadsGeneral Purpose SSD volume that balances price performance for a wide variety of transactional workloadsLowest cost SSD volume that balances price performance for a wide variety of transactional workloadsLow cost HDD volume designed for frequently accessed, throughput intensive workloadsLowest cost HDD volume designed for less frequently accessed workloads
Use casesI/O-intensive NoSQL and relational databasesBoot volumes, low-latency interactive apps, dev & testBoot volumes, low-latency interactive apps, dev & testBig data, data warehouses, log processingColder data requiring fewer scans per day
API nameio1gp2gp3st1sc1
Volume size4 GiB - 16 TiB1 GiB - 16 TiB1 GiB - 16 TiB500 GiB - 16 TiB500 GiB - 16 TiB
Max IOPS [lower-alpha 2] /volume64,00016,00016,000500250
Max throughput/volume1000 MB/s250 MB/s1000 MB/s500 MB/s250 MB/s
Max IOPS/instance260,000260,000260,000260,000260,000
Max throughput/instance7,500 MB/s7,500 MB/s7,500 MB/s7,500 MB/s7,500 MB/s
Price$0.125/GB-month

$0.065/provisioned IOPS

$0.10/GB-month$0.08/GB-month

$0.005/provisioned IOPS over 3000

$0.045/GB-month$0.025/GB-month
Dominant performance attributeIOPSIOPSIOPSMB/sMB/s
  1. Default volume type
  2. io1/gp2 based on 16 KiB I/O size, st1/sc1 based on 1 MiB I/O size

Features

Amazon EBS provides several features that assist with data management, backups, and performance tuning:

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM Db2</span> Relational model database server

Db2 is a family of data management products, including database servers, developed by IBM. It initially supported the relational model, but was extended to support object–relational features and non-relational structures like JSON and XML. The brand name was originally styled as DB2 until 2017, when it changed to its present form.

In computer storage, logical volume management or LVM provides a method of allocating space on mass-storage devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes to store volumes. In particular, a volume manager can concatenate, stripe together or otherwise combine partitions into larger virtual partitions that administrators can re-size or move, potentially without interrupting system use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amazon Web Services</span> On-demand cloud computing company

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis. Clients will often use this in combination with autoscaling. These cloud computing web services provide various services related to networking, compute, storage, middleware, IoT and other processing capacity, as well as software tools via AWS server farms. This frees clients from managing, scaling, and patching hardware and operating systems. One of the foundational services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, with extremely high availability, which can be interacted with over the internet via REST APIs, a CLI or the AWS console. AWS's virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM memory; Hard-disk(HDD)/SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM).

The IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) is a block storage virtualization appliance that belongs to the IBM System Storage product family. SVC implements an indirection, or "virtualization", layer in a Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN).

Gluster Inc. was a software company that provided an open source platform for scale-out public and private cloud storage. The company was privately funded and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with an engineering center in Bangalore, India. Gluster was funded by Nexus Venture Partners and Index Ventures. Gluster was acquired by Red Hat on October 7, 2011.

Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its e-commerce network. Amazon S3 can store any type of object, which allows uses like storage for Internet applications, backups, disaster recovery, data archives, data lakes for analytics, and hybrid cloud storage. AWS launched Amazon S3 in the United States on March 14, 2006, then in Europe in November 2007.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud</span> Cloud computing platform

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of applications by providing a web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to configure a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate server-instances as needed, paying by the second for active servers – hence the term "elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy. In November 2010, Amazon switched its own retail website platform to EC2 and AWS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amazon SimpleDB</span> Cloud-based distributed database service

Amazon SimpleDB is a distributed database written in Erlang by Amazon.com. It is used as a web service in concert with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon S3 and is part of Amazon Web Services. It was announced on December 13, 2007.

Eucalyptus is a paid and open-source computer software for building Amazon Web Services (AWS)-compatible private and hybrid cloud computing environments, originally developed by the company Eucalyptus Systems. Eucalyptus is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. Eucalyptus enables pooling compute, storage, and network resources that can be dynamically scaled up or down as application workloads change. Mårten Mickos was the CEO of Eucalyptus. In September 2014, Eucalyptus was acquired by Hewlett-Packard and then maintained by DXC Technology. After DXC stopped developing the product in late 2017, AppScale Systems forked the code and started supporting Eucalyptus customers.

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a special type of virtual appliance that is used to create a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud ("EC2"). It serves as the basic unit of deployment for services delivered using EC2.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virtual private cloud</span> Pool of shared resources allocated within a public cloud environment

A virtual private cloud (VPC) is an on-demand configurable pool of shared resources allocated within a public cloud environment, providing a certain level of isolation between the different organizations (denoted as users hereafter) using the resources. The isolation between one VPC user and all other users of the same cloud (other VPC users as well as other public cloud users) is achieved normally through allocation of a private IP subnet and a virtual communication construct (such as a VLAN or a set of encrypted communication channels) per user. In a VPC, the previously described mechanism, providing isolation within the cloud, is accompanied with a virtual private network (VPN) function (again, allocated per VPC user) that secures, by means of authentication and encryption, the remote access of the organization to its VPC resources. With the introduction of the described isolation levels, an organization using this service is in effect working on a 'virtually private' cloud (that is, as if the cloud infrastructure is not shared with other users), and hence the name VPC.

Amazon Relational Database Service is a distributed relational database service by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is a web service running "in the cloud" designed to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling of a relational database for use in applications. Administration processes like patching the database software, backing up databases and enabling point-in-time recovery are managed automatically. Scaling storage and compute resources can be performed by a single API call to the AWS control plane on-demand. AWS does not offer an SSH connection to the underlying virtual machine as part of the managed service.

A cloud database is a database that typically runs on a cloud computing platform and access to the database is provided as-a-service. There are two common deployment models: users can run databases on the cloud independently, using a virtual machine image, or they can purchase access to a database service, maintained by a cloud database provider. Of the databases available on the cloud, some are SQL-based and some use a NoSQL data model.

Amazon Aurora is a relational database service developed and offered by Amazon Web Services beginning in October 2014. Aurora is available as part of the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).

Autoscaling, also spelled auto scaling or auto-scaling, and sometimes also called automatic scaling, is a method used in cloud computing that dynamically adjusts the amount of computational resources in a server farm - typically measured by the number of active servers - automatically based on the load on the farm. For example, the number of servers running behind a web application may be increased or decreased automatically based on the number of active users on the site. Since such metrics may change dramatically throughout the course of the day, and servers are a limited resource that cost money to run even while idle, there is often an incentive to run "just enough" servers to support the current load while still being able to support sudden and large spikes in activity. Autoscaling is helpful for such needs, as it can reduce the number of active servers when activity is low, and launch new servers when activity is high. Autoscaling is closely related to, and builds upon, the idea of load balancing.

Block-level storage is a concept in cloud-hosted data persistence where cloud services emulate the behaviour of a traditional block device, such as a physical hard drive.

This is a timeline of Amazon Web Services, which offers a suite of cloud computing services that make up an on-demand computing platform.

Amazon Neptune is a managed graph database product published by Amazon.com. It is used as a web service and is part of Amazon Web Services (AWS). It was announced on November 29, 2017. Amazon Neptune supports popular graph models property graph and W3C's RDF, and their respective query languages Apache TinkerPop's Gremlin, openCypher, and SPARQL, including other Amazon Web Services products.

Amazon Elastic File System is a cloud storage service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) designed to provide scalable, elastic, concurrent with some restrictions, and encrypted file storage for use with both AWS cloud services and on-premises resources. Amazon EFS is built to be able to grow and shrink automatically as files are added and removed. Amazon EFS supports Network File System (NFS) versions 4.0 and 4.1 (NFSv4) protocol, and control access to files through Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) permissions.

AWS Graviton is a family of 64-bit ARM-based CPUs designed by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) subsidiary Annapurna Labs. The processor family is distinguished by its lower energy use relative to x86-64, static clock rates, and omission of simultaneous multithreading. It was designed to be tightly integrated with AWS servers and datacenters, and is not sold outside Amazon.

References

  1. "DB Instance Storage - Amazon Relational Database Service". docs.aws.amazon.com.
  2. "EC2 Instance Store vs EBS". May 31, 2022. Archived from the original on June 16, 2022. Retrieved June 16, 2022.
  3. "Constraints on the size and configuration of an EBS volume". Amazon Web Services Documentation. Archived from the original on 2017-10-11. Retrieved Sep 11, 2020.
  4. "Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - Bring Us Your Data". Amazon Web Services Blog. August 20, 2008. Archived from the original on March 28, 2011. Retrieved May 31, 2013.
  5. "AWS Free Tier". Amazon Web Services, Inc.
  6. "Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) – Details – Amazon Web Services (AWS)". Amazon Web Services, Inc. Retrieved 2017-12-31.
  7. "Announcing Provisioned IOPS for Amazon EBS". Amazon Web Services, Inc.
  8. "Amazon EBS Features". Amazon Web Services. Archived from the original on 2018-09-20. Retrieved Sep 11, 2020.
  9. "7 Little-Known Amazon EBS Features You Should Be Using". Sand Hill. January 17, 2020. Archived from the original on 2020-01-27. Retrieved Sep 11, 2020.
  10. "AWS EBS: A Complete Guide and Five Functions You Should Start Using". Cloud Central Blog. June 4, 2019. Archived from the original on 2017-07-26. Retrieved Sep 11, 2020.