Whether you are using AWS EC2 for your daily business operations or for big data analytics, chances are a large part of your monthly EC2 bill is coming from the EBS volumes storing your instance data. EBS volumes are Amazon’s virtual disks that can be created and attached to your EC2 instances to give them additional storage capacity. These EBS volumes are an expensive place to store data because of their high cost-per-GiB, their capacity-based billing model, and their requirement for disk snapshots to provide data durability. When you create an EBS volume you are paying for the full disk capacity, regardless of how much of that disk is actually in use, at their high cost-per-GiB.

Today we are excited to announce CloudBD, a low-cost, consumption-based virtual disk solution for your EC2 instances. CloudBD disks can be created as large as 16 PiB (16,384 TiB) and offer up to 1000x greater data durability, 4x higher max read and write throughput, and up to 90% lower monthly costs than EBS volumes.

CloudBD is Linux software that uses low-cost, high durability object storage, such as AWS S3, to create virtual disks for your EC2 instances. Similar to EBS volumes, CloudBD disks are easy to create and can attach to your EC2 instances automatically at startup. All CloudBD disk data is stored securely inside your own configurable S3 buckets.

Cost Efficient

CloudBD disks are thinly allocated and have a consumption-based billing model. Disk costs scale proportional to how full the disk is. Unused disk space is free so your disks can be created with extra capacity for future storage requirements without extra costs.

Deleting data from your CloudBD disks reduces consumption and lowers your storage costs. CloudBD disks have a lower cost-per-GiB than comparable EBS volumes so even while full, CloudBD disks can reduce your monthly storage costs.

High Throughput

CloudBD disks are designed for high throughput performance. They support up to 2 GiB/s read and write which is more than 4x the maximum throughput of an EBS volume. Here are some of our results from testing CloudBD disks on a few EC2 instance types.

Throughput of CloudBD Disks vs Amazon EBS Volumes

Consistency and Compatibility

CloudBD uses patent pending algorithms to provide strong data consistency for eventually consistent object storage systems like S3. CloudBD disks fully support flush, trim, and block discard operations. They can be used with POSIX compliant filesystems (e.g., ext4, xfs, btrfs).

When attached, CloudBD disks are block devices that behave just like a real physical disk attached to the server. They are compatible with other Linux disk tools such as dm-crypt (disk encryption) and LVM (logical volume management/snapshots).

Unlimited Duration Free Trial

The CloudBD software is available as an unlimited duration free trial for up to 500 GiB of disk capacity (no credit card required). Upgrading from the free trial to the professional tier removes the 500 GiB capacity limit and lets you create thinly allocated disks as large as 16 PiB (16,777,216 GiB).

CloudBD on AWS Demo

The easiest way to get started with CloudBD disks is by using the CloudFormation All-In-One project on GitHub. The All-In-One tool creates a self contained test environment using CloudFormation and preconfigures an EC2 instance for testing. You can also follow the documentation on how to install and configure CloudBD on existing EC2 instances.

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