Amazon Web Services announced the availability of a new, lower cost SSD-backed volume type for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). Customers can now choose between three Amazon EBS volume types: General Purpose (SSD), Provisioned IOPS (SSD), and Magnetic volumes.
AWS said the new General Purpose (SSD) volumes are designed to support the vast majority of persistent storage workloads and are the new default Amazon EBS volume. AWS cites five nines of availability and the ability to burst 3,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) per volume, independent of volume size, to meet the performance needs of most applications and also deliver a consistent baseline of three IOPS per gigabyte. Prices start at $0.10/GB.
Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes are designed for I/O-intensive applications such as large relational or NoSQL databases where performance consistency and low latency are critical. With Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes, customers choose the amount of IOPS they require, up to 48,000 IOPS per Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, and they only have to provision and pay for the storage they need.
Customers can launch General Purpose (SSD) volumes using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS SDKs. General Purpose (SSD) volumes are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Brazil (Sao Paulo) Regions.
