Amazon Web Services has added a new volume type option for its Elastic Block Store: SSD. Amazon hopes the general-purpose SSD volumes will provide customers with a high-performance, low-cost solution.
The new volumes have been engineered to provide AWS customers with predictable performance for a variety of workloads. For example, workload types might include personal productivity, small-to-medium databases, test and development environments, and boot volumes.
According to a press release, AWS' SSD volumes are the new default Amazon EBS volume. They can burst up to 3,000 input/output operations per second per volume, regardless of volume size. This gives AWS customers three volume types to choose from: General Purpose SSD, Provisioned IOPS SSD, and Magnetic. Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes are made for I/O-intensive applications like large relational or NoSQL databases where consistency and low latency are crucial. Customers are able to choose the amount of IOPS they require and only have to pay for what they need. Amazon's IOPS goes all the way up to 48,000 IOPS per Elastic Compute Cloud instance.
"Customers have been using Amazon EBS since 2008 to run their most demanding applications and databases on AWS. We continue to iterate on the service to support the evolving needs of our customers," said Peter De Santis, VP of compute at Amazon Web Services.
Amazon EBS customers who've already tried out the new General Purpose SSD volumes in beta have nothing but praise for the service. A representative from enterprise software firm Infor said, "We're able to achieve higher baseline I/O performance and to support periodic spikes in the application workload that deliver a consistent experience to service the high expectations of our enterprise users."
A customer from database service MongoLab noted, "The burst capabilities are impressive, and great for bulk data loads and exports." Software service Bracket Computing added, "We're really impressed with the I/O performance. These new Amazon EBS volume types are already cutting workload runtimes by nearly half."
Customers can access the new General Purpose SSD volumes via the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface, or AWS SDKs.
General Purpose SSD volumes are available to customers in the following regions: U.S. East (Northern Virginia), U.S. West (Oregon or Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore or Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Brazil (Sao Paulo). Pricing for the new SSD service starts at 10-cents per gigabyte.
