Posted On: Nov 5, 2020

You can now enable Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) on Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots, ensuring that EBS volumes restored from FSR-enabled snapshots instantly receive full provisioned performance. You can enable FSR for an additional hourly charge to your regular snapshot cost for each Availability Zone (AZ) in which FSR is enabled. This new capability enables you to restore multiple volumes from a snapshot without the need to initialize volumes yourself. Improved and predictable performance helps with use cases such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), backup & restore, test/dev volume copies, and booting from custom AMIs. 

Data from an EBS snapshot is lazy loaded into an EBS volume. If the volume is accessed where the data is not loaded, the application accessing the volume encounters a higher latency than normal while the data gets loaded. To avoid this impact for latency sensitive applications, customers pre-warm their data from a snapshot into an EBS volume. 

Now, volumes created from FSR-enabled snapshots are fully initialized upon creation and immediately deliver all provisioned performance. You can also enable FSR on snapshots created by your Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) policies.

To learn more, see the technical documentation, blog, and pricing pages on FSR. This feature is now available through the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, or the AWS console.