

New EBS (AWS) volume type: General Purpose (SSD) - jacobscott

It looks like Amazon has released a third EBS volume type, and renamed &quot;Standard&quot; volumes to &quot;Magnetic&quot;. General Purpose is currently the default type when launching &quot;Create Volume&quot; in the EC2 Web UI (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;console.aws.amazon.com&#x2F;ec2&#x2F;v2&#x2F;home), which provides the following documentation:<p>&quot;General Purpose (SSD) volumes provide the ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS per volume, independent of volume size, to meet the performance needs of most applications and also deliver a consistent baseline of 3 IOPS&#x2F;GiB. Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes can deliver up to 4000 IOPS and are best for EBS-optimized instances. Magnetic volumes, previously called &#x27;standard volumes&#x27;, deliver approximately 100 IOPS on average, with a best effort ability to burst to hundreds of IOPS.&quot;<p>The EBS Pricing page (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;ebs&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;) currently makes no mention of General Purpose (SSD) volumes.
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renaudg
Is it supposed to be all smooth sailing launching gp2 instances from standard
snapshots and vice versa ?

It may be just me but I've had really weird and serious new errors today in
us-east-1 launching new instances, or even starting previously stopped ones
with no changes to the instance whatsoever ! General slowness, "reachability"
health check failing, with the system log showing that the kernel couldn't be
uncompressed, maybe because the bootloader couldn't find the root device in
the first place ? I'm not using custom kernels at all.

The timing is too strange for it to be a coincidence, but nothing on the AWS
status page.

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nnx
Official announcement just been released.

[http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ssd-backed-elastic-
block...](http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ssd-backed-elastic-block-
storage/)

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exidy
Interesting. I can create a gp2 volume through the console, but not through
CloudFormation.

    
    
      UPDATE_FAILED - gp2 is invalid. Valid volume types are standard and io1.

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dandekar
We can look into this if you can provide the stack id.

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exidy
Thanks, but I'll contact AWS support through our account.

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albanr
It'll be interesting to see how much CloudCorset will be able to
impact/improve performance by reducing the number of IOPS that goes to the EBS
storage backend.
[http://www.cloudcorset.com/?ref=Tie98](http://www.cloudcorset.com/?ref=Tie98)

