What is Amazon EBS?

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides persistent block storage for your EC2 instances.

Unlike Instance Store, EBS volumes are network-attached and data persists even after the instance is stopped or terminated.

Each EBS volume is replicated within its Availability Zone (AZ) for high availability and durability.

EBS Volume Types

Amazon EBS offers different volume types optimized for specific workloads.

They are broadly categorized into:

• SSD-based volumes — for transactional workloads (e.g., databases, boot volumes)
• HDD-based volumes — for throughput-intensive workloads (e.g., big data, logs)

1. gp3 (General Purpose SSD)

Use Case: Boot volumes, small to medium databases, development environments.

• Performance:
  • Baseline: 3,000 IOPS
  • Max: 16,000 IOPS
  • Max throughput: 1,000 MB/s
• Scalability: You can independently scale IOPS and throughput.
• Cost-effective: Lower cost compared to gp2.

Example (kaptaindevops):

kaptaindevops uses gp3 volumes for web servers and CI/CD build agents for balanced performance and price.

2. gp2 (General Purpose SSD - Legacy)