Posted On: Jun 30, 2021

AWS now supports three additional Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume types in the Los Angeles AWS Local Zones: General Purpose SSD (gp3), Throughput Optimized HDD (st1), and Cold HDD (sc1) volumes. With this expansion, you can now use gp3, st1, and sc1 volume types in addition to your existing gp2 and io1 volumes in the Los Angeles AWS Local Zones.

EBS gp3 enables customers to provision performance independent of storage capacity and provides up to 20% lower price-point per GB than existing gp2 volumes. Customers can scale IOPS (input/output operations per second) and throughput without needing to provision additional block storage capacity, and pay only for the resources they need. gp3 volumes deliver a baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125MB/s at any volume size. For use cases where the application needs more performance than the baseline, you can scale up to 16,000 IOPS and 1,000 MB/s for an additional fee. This makes the new gp3 volumes ideal for a wide variety of applications that require high performance at low cost, including MySQL, Cassandra, virtual desktops, and Hadoop analytics clusters.

Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) is a low cost HDD volume type designed for higher throughput applications requiring up to 500 MB/s throughput, while Cold HDD (sc1) is an even lower cost HDD volume type designed for large, less frequently accessed, high-throughput data workloads requiring up to 250 MB/s throughput. st1 and sc1 volumes deliver consistent baseline performance with the ability to “burst” to higher throughput in order to meet the performance needs of MapReduce, Kafka, Extract/Transform and Load (ETL), log processing, and data warehouse workloads.

Customers can easily migrate their existing gp2 or io1 volumes to any of these additional volume types (gp3, st1, sc1) using Elastic Volumes, which is an existing feature of Amazon EBS. Elastic Volumes allows customers to modify the volume type, IOPS, or throughput of their existing EBS volumes without interrupting their Amazon EC2 instances. For more information on these volume types, please see the product overview page and documentation. To learn more about AWS Local Zones, please visit the AWS Local Zones website.