

New EBS volume type: General Purpose (SSD) - cperciva
http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/details/

======
Icer5k
All I have to say is "Wow". I just switched our boot drives in us-west-2 over,
and our initialization time was cut in half (~7 minutes to ~3 minutes).

As someone who launches a lot of instances based on user demand, I'm very
excited EC2 has finally addressed the glaring speed issues with EBS volumes.
This brings boot times in line with the original GCE boot times, which were
stellar.

Of course, time will tell if the new General Purpose volumes can hold up as
more users come onto the system, but for now I'm impressed.

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nnx
Is there any information about the expected durability of the new EBS SSD
volumes compared to the old Magnetic ones?

FAQ is still showing the same "Magnetic-era" numbers:

" most recent Amazon EBS Snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of
between 0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume.
This compares with commodity hard disks that typically fail with an AFR of
around 4%, making EBS volumes 10 times more reliable than typical commodity
disk drives. "

~~~
nnx
Also, is it still recommended to pre-warm volumes? or is this now unnecessary
(or even harmful) with SSDs?

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-
prewa...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-prewarm.html)

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drob
Really neat announcement. This opens up a bunch of interesting possibilities
for applications that are cpu-bound once you're on SSD, but for which the
delta between SSD-backed EBS and ephemeral storage doesn't change the
bottleneck.

In particular, in that sort of scenario, you might be able to mix-and-match
and get a compute-optimized instance with loads of cpu power and a healthy
amount of sufficiently performant storage on EBS.

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cperciva
Jeff Barr's blog post about this: [http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ssd-
backed-elastic-block...](http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ssd-backed-
elastic-block-storage/)

~~~
tombrossman
Interesting quote from his post _" Our testing indicates that a typical Linux
boot requires about 7,000 I/O operations and a typical Windows boot requires
about 70,000."_

I had assumed Linux was lighter-weight from casually observing the difference
in boot times, but that's a 10x difference!

~~~
kelnos
I think that's a bit of a weird comparison: a "typical" Linux boot on a server
usually doesn't involve bringing up a GUI, while on Windows you're always
bringing the GUI up (right? I haven't touched Windows in years; maybe new
Windows Server versions have a true headless option?). If you were to bring up
X11 with a full-featured desktop environment on a Linux server, I imagine the
I/O operation count would go up quite a bit.

~~~
sootzoo
Windows Server has supported "Core" editions of its products back to 2008
where the UI is simply a login screen and command prompt for remotely-
managed/headless operation. In my experience most Windows admins still prefer
the GUI. And while it does obviously save some resources not to load the full
UI, the cost of the additional cores/memory to run it is minimal by
comparison.

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jacobscott
Previously a 1TB, 4K PIOPS volume was $525/mo. With a 35% discount on PIOPS
this now runs $385/mo, but you can also get 1TB, 3K PIOPS General Purpose
volume for $100/mo. Pretty nice price drop!

Generally, since 1 GB of GP SSD costs as much as 1 PIOP, in most cases you
should just purchase a max(DESIRED_VOLSIZE, DESIRED_PIOPS/3)GB GP SSD volume
rather than a PIOPS volume. I think.

~~~
e1g
The 3,000 IOPS figure for General Purpose SSDs comes with two caveats - it is
available only in bursts for up to 30 minutes and it comes out of a capped
reserve which is slowly refilled over time based on the size of the drive. In
other words, it is not Provisioned IOPS.

If you wanted it to be true PIOPS, the cost of a 1TB 3K PIOPS SSD is $425
(1,000GB * $0.125 for storage plus 3,000 PIOPS * $0.1 for operations). (EDIT:
this figures are wrong; please see responses below for the right math).

EDIT: My understanding was incomplete - General Purpose SSDs can burst up to
3k IOPS, but they also provide provisioned IOPS at a rate of 3 IOPS per GB.
Effectively, 1TB drive then _does_ provide 3k PIOPS (3 * 1,000GB) and bursting
limits are only a factor for smaller drives.

~~~
jacobscott
From Jeff Barr's blog post ([http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ssd-backed-
elastic-block...](http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ssd-backed-elastic-
block-storage)):

* A bucket is associated with each General Purpose (SSD) volume, and can hold up to 5.4 million tokens.

* Tokens accumulate at a rate of 3 per configured GB per second, up to the capacity of the bucket

I take this to mean that a 1TB GP SSD gets 3K tokens/sec = consistent 3K
PIOPS. Can you explain where you disagree?

~~~
e1g
Thank you for correcting me. I disagreed after reading the same blog post, but
after your explanation I realised I completely missed the baseline performance
guarantee. Your math was spot on!

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paukiatwee
Off topic for EBS, but for AWS. Anyone know AWS EC2 current generation more
expensive than previous generation(almost 100%)?

[https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/)

Any blog regarding this announcement?

For comparison: AWS small instance (3.75GB) $55.25 per month (1 year contract)
VS GCE small instance (3.75GB) $35.38 per month.

Note: GCE pricing calculator
[https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/](https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/)

~~~
sah88
I think amazon has a pricing error on their website for the light utilization
instances since the April price drop as they are more expensive than even the
on demand ones (at least the ones I looked at).

I submitted a support ticket but haven't heard anything back. Once you start
looking at medium reservation the prices fall significantly.

For example for the 3.75GB m3.medium is $51.1 on demand per month vs ~56 for
the light reservation vs ~35 for the medium reservation. All running 24/7 and
1 year terms on reservations.

EDIT: Just got a reply on my support ticket. I guess the light reservation
instances are just for reserving capacity now.

"You are correct about the Light Utilization Reserved Instances. I have
brought this to the attention of the EC2 pricing team to see if this is an
error on our part. Unfortunately, these Reserved Instance types now only cover
Capacity Reservation and no longer offer a discounted hourly rate over the On
Demand hourly prices."

~~~
joevandyk
Ha, I emailed my rep about that exact same thing 12 hours ago.

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jpsim
This has the potential of bringing Amazon into an industry they helped create,
but were never a major contender in.

I'm talking about the space DigitalOcean and Linode now occupy. Hobbyists who
need a quick, multipurpose machine might actually consider Amazon now.

Either that, or a new "hosting" company will slap a simpler UI on top of EC2
and reap the benefits.

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akurilin
Thoughts on running Postgres with provisioned IOPS on EBS SSDs with this
latest change? Still pretty far from running on dedicated hardware?

~~~
mrmondo
It still doesn't come close to read hardware / single level virtualisation.

3-4K IOP/s is actually pretty poor, for example I have two USB keys that can
do 39K IOP/s (given thats at 4K, not 16k) and my laptop has a SSD that does
95K.

~~~
orcadk
Not really a fair comparison. If we're comparing to USB keys, you should at
least compare to ephemeral SSDs rather than EBS SSDs. Unlike EBS, your USB
disk isn't made for 99.999% durability, doesn't allow snapshotting, etc.

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qwerta
Does anyone else experience poor disk IO performance on AWS? I ran 'dd
if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/file' and the speed is between 1-10 MB/s. I would expect
hundreds of MB/s if they advertise SSD.

~~~
mjb
There is a first-touch penalty with EBS volumes. Follow the pre-warming guide
and then try your benchmark again:
[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-
prewa...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-prewarm.html)

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jacobscott
If we assume stability, in what circumstances would PIOPS or Magnetic volumes
be preferable to General Purpose?

For example, workloads that use an average of < ~.4 IOP per GB per second,
might save money using Magnetic.

~~~
mtanski
Storing a lot of "colder" data but where you might want to be able to have
better then S3 speed of transfer.

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thspimpolds
Is there any easy migration for a block volume? I'm guessing no....

~~~
mjb
You can't do online migration, but migration via a snapshot should be quick
and easy. Snapshots are incremental, so the best way to get low downtime is to
create a snapshot, then when that one completes, unmount the old volume and
snapshot again. The second snapshot should be really quick, especially if your
application isn't write-heavy.

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dorfsmay
There is no per I/O charge? Only a fee per GB per month?

~~~
bbgm
That is correct. The new General Purpose volume type is only charged based on
the size of your volumes.

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kondro
Is it just me or is there no way to create encrypted and either SSD or
magnetic volume types via the Ruby SDK?

~~~
pmoon
The EC2 client class allows you to do it.
[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSRubySDK/latest/AWS/EC2/Client/...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSRubySDK/latest/AWS/EC2/Client/V20140501.html#create_volume-
instance_method)

