New – Amazon EBS gp3 Volume Lets You Provision Performance Apart From Capacity

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is an easy-to-use, high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon EC2 instances for both throughput and transaction-intensive workloads of all sizes. Using existing general purpose solid state drive (SSD) gp2 volumes, performance scales with storage capacity. By provisioning larger storage volume sizes, you can improve application input / output operations per second (IOPS) and throughput.

However some applications, such as MySQL, Cassandra, and Hadoop clusters, require high performance but not high storage capacity. Customers want to meet the performance requirements of these types of applications without paying for more storage volumes than they need.

Today I would like to tell you about gp3, a new type of SSD EBS volume that lets you provision performance independent of storage capacity, and offers a 20% lower price than existing gp2 volume types.

New gp3 Volume Type

With EBS, customers can choose from multiple volume types based on the unique needs of their applications. We introduced general purpose SSD gp2 volumes in 2014 to offer SSD performance at a very low price. gp2 provides an easy and cost-effective way to meet the performance and throughput requirements of many applications our customers use such as virtual desktops, medium-sized databases such as SQLServer and OracleDB, and development and testing environments.

That said, some customers need higher performance. Because the basic idea behind gp2 is that the larger the capacity, the faster the IOPS, customers may end up provisioning more storage capacity than desired. Even though gp2 offers a low price point, customers end up paying for storage they don’t need.

The new gp3 is the 7th variation of EBS volume types. It lets customers independently increase IOPS and throughput without having to provision additional block storage capacity, paying only for the resources they need.

gp3 is designed to provide predictable 3,000 IOPS baseline performance and 125 MiB/s regardless of volume size. It is ideal for applications that require high performance at a low cost such as MySQL, Cassandra, virtual desktops and Hadoop analytics. Customers looking for higher performance can scale up to 16,000 IOPS and 1,000 MiB/s for an additional fee. The top performance of gp3 is 4 times faster than max throughput of gp2 volumes.

How to Switch From gp2 to gp3

If you’re currently using gp2, you can easily migrate your EBS volumes to gp3 using Amazon EBS Elastic Volumes, an existing feature of Amazon EBS. Elastic Volumes allows you to modify the volume type, IOPS, and throughput of your existing EBS volumes without interrupting your Amazon EC2 instances. Also, when you create a new Amazon EBS volume, Amazon EC2 instance, or Amazon Machine Image (AMI), you can choose the gp3 volume type. New AWS customers receive 30GiB of gp3 storage with the baseline performance at no charge for 12 months.

Available Today

The gp3 volume type is available for all AWS Regions. You can access the AWS Management Console to launch your first gp3 volume.

For more information, see Amazon Elastic Block Store and get started with gp3 today.

– Kame