Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) makes it easy for you to create persistent block level storage volumes and attach them to your EC2 instances. Among many other features, EBS allows you to provision SSD-backed volumes with the desired level of performance (Provisioned IOPS or PIOPS) and to create snapshot backups either manually or programmatically.

Today I would like to tell you about some improvements and changes that we are making to both of these features. We are increasing the number of IOPS that you can provision per GB of storage and we are reducing the price of snapshot storage by 47%. Together, these changes make EBS more powerful and even more economical.

More PIOPS per GiB

We introduced the concept of Provisioned IOPS back in 2012 (read my post, Fast Forward – Provisioned IOPS for EBS Volumes, to learn more). With Provisioned IOPS, you can dial in the precise level of performance that you need for each EBS volume. The number of PIOPS that you can configure is a function of the volume size; the larger the volume, the more PIOPS you can configure, up to a per-volume maximum of 20,000 PIOPS.

Until now, you could provision up to 30 IOPS per GiB of SSD-backed storage. Now, you can provision up to 50 IOPS per GiB for new EBS volumes (a 66% increase). As has always been the case, Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) volumes are designed to deliver within 10% of the provisioned IOPS performance 99.9% of the time in a given year (read the EBS Performance FAQ to learn more).

Some AWS customers create small EBS volumes that are intended to run extremely “hot”, maxing out the available PIOPS either occasionally or continuously. With this change, these small, hot volumes can be considerably smaller while still delivering the same level of performance. For example, if you need 20,000 PIOPS you can create a 400 GiB volume instead of a 667 GiB volume:

This change applies to all newly created SSD-backed volumes in all commercial AWS Regions.

Snapshot Price Reduction

We are reducing the prices for EBS snapshots by 47% for all AWS Regions.

With this change, snapshots are even more economical! As a result, you can take backups more frequently in order to reduce recovery time after human errors. If you are not making backups of your EBS volumes on a regular basis, now is a good time to start!

This price reduction is retroactive to August 1, 2016 and will be applied automatically; it also applies to snapshots of Gateway-Cached volumes that are used with the AWS Storage Gateway.

Join our Team

If you are a developer, development manager, or product manager and would like to build systems like this, please visit the EBS Jobs page.

— Jeff;