AWS Solutions Architect · Lesson

EBS Volume Types: gp3, io2, st1, sc1

Compare General Purpose SSD, Provisioned IOPS SSD, Throughput Optimised HDD, and Cold HDD to pick the right volume for your workload.

EBS Volume Overview

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides persistent block storage volumes for EC2 instances. Unlike instance store (which is ephemeral and tied to the instance lifecycle), EBS volumes exist independently of the instances they are attached to — data survives instance stops, reboots, and even (with detachment) instance termination. EBS volumes are replicated within a single Availability Zone for durability. Understanding the four volume types is essential for the SAA-C03 exam.

gp3: General Purpose SSD (Current Generation)

gp3 is the current-generation general-purpose SSD volume. Key characteristics: 3,000 IOPS baseline included at no extra cost regardless of volume size, up to 16,000 IOPS and 1,000 MB/s throughput (both independently configurable), and a size range of 1 GiB to 16 TiB. gp3 is 20% cheaper than gp2 and should be your default choice for most workloads including boot volumes, development environments, small-to-medium databases, and low-latency interactive applications.

# Create a gp3 volume with custom IOPS and throughput
aws ec2 create-volume \
  --volume-type gp3 \
  --size 500 \
  --iops 6000 \
  --throughput 500 \
  --availability-zone us-east-1a \
  --encrypted

# gp3 allows IOPS and throughput to be set independently
# Baseline: 3,000 IOPS / 125 MB/s
# Maximum: 16,000 IOPS / 1,000 MB/s

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