Quick notes on EC2 storage

Dog Days of DevOps 2024

Ian Littman / @ian@phpc.social

Slides at ian.im/dd24

We're ignoring S3 (sorta)

• EBS
• Instance store
• EFS

EBS

• Always used for your boot volume
• Can attach additional data volumes
• Can be moved around hosts, and can persist detached
• Performance can be reprovisioned online (will optimize in background)
• Snapshots
  • Background-loaded from S3 (low perf); to force a quicker load use fio
  • Can be warmed for instant full performance for 75¢/hr

EBS Volume Types

• You probably want gp3
  • Normally 125 MB/s, 3k IOPS
  • Max of 1 GB/s, 16k IOPS (for more $$)
  • Use software RAID to stripe volumes for additional performance
  • Instances have bandwidth limits for EBS
• io2 exists ($$$), for up to 4GB/s, 256k IOPS, multi-attach
• Magnetic volume types exist for cheap throughput or cold storage

Instance store

• Only available on some instances (e.g. "d" suffixed families)
• Massive IOPS and throughput (e.g. compute optimized specs)
• Survives reboots
• Does not survive stopping the instance
• Probably don't put in your fstab
• Bigger instances have multiple volumes; stripe them with software RAID

EFS

• Low-latency NFS mount accessible from multiple instances
• High per-file-system total throughput + IOPS
  • 30 GiB/s read
  • 5 GiB/s write
  • 90k-250k IOPS
• 1,500 MiB/s per client
• Requires special handling to get max performance
• Numbers above for Elastic Throughput; prices charge along two dimensions
  • per GB stored (e.g. 30¢/mo)
  • per GB transferred (e.g. 6¢)
  • Can trade performance and cost for cheaper storage and more expensive transfer

Thanks!

Questions? Find me here, at @ian@phpc.social, or @iansltx

Slides: https://ian.im/dd24