Posted On: Jan 13, 2021
Today we announced the availability of gp3, the next-generation general purpose SSD volumes for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) that enable customers to provision performance independent of storage capacity and provides up to 20% lower price-point per GB than existing gp2 volumes. With gp3 volumes, customers can scale IOPS (input/output operations per second) and throughput without needing to provision additional block storage capacity, and pay only for the resources they need.
General purpose SSD volumes make it easy and cost effective for customers to meet the IOPS and throughput requirements for transaction-intensive workloads, such as virtual desktops, test and development environments, low-latency interactive applications, and boot volumes. With existing general purpose SSD (gp2) volumes, performance is tied to storage capacity, enabling customers to get higher IOPS and throughput for their applications by provisioning a larger storage volume size. But customers want to scale performance and throughput without paying for storage that they don’t need.
Next generation gp3 volumes offer the ability to independently provision IOPS and throughput, separate from storage capacity. This enables customers to scale performance for transaction-intensive workloads without needing to provision more capacity, so they only pay for the resources they need. The new gp3 volumes also deliver a baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125MB/s at any volume size. For use cases, where your application needs more performance than the baseline, customers can scale up to 16,000 IOPS and 1,000 MB/s for an additional fee. This makes the new gp3 volumes ideal for a wide variety of applications that require high performance at low cost, including MySQL, Cassandra, virtual desktops, and Hadoop analytics clusters.
Customers can easily migrate gp2 volumes to gp3 volumes using Elastic Volumes, which is an existing feature of Amazon EBS. Elastic Volumes allow customers to modify the volume type, IOPS, or throughput of their existing EBS volumes without interrupting their Amazon EC2 instances. gp3 volumes are available in both the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet, and the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD. For more information, please see the gp3 announcement on the Amazon News blog, product overview page, and documentation.