Amazon’s EBS (Elastic Block Store)
by Justin Leider on August 21, 2008
I wrote just yesterday about running your own hardware vs. using EC2 and RightScale and one of the major issues I found with EC2 was the lack of a persistent storage medium. Well, I knew the folks over at Amazon were hard at work on a new service that would allow persistent storage and turns out I received this email in my mailbox this morning:
Dear AWS Developer,
We are pleased to announce the release of a significant new Amazon EC2 feature, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), which provides persistent storage for your Amazon EC2 instances. With Amazon EBS, storage volumes can be programmatically created, attached to Amazon EC2 instances, and if even more durability is desired, can be backed with a snapshot to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
Prior to Amazon EBS, block storage within an Amazon EC2 instance was tied to the instance itself so that when the instance was terminated, the data within the instance was lost. Now with Amazon EBS, users can chose to allocate storage volumes that persist reliably and independently from Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes can be created in any size between 1 GB and 1 TB, and multiple volumes can be attached to a single instance. Additionally, for even more durable backups and an easy way to create new volumes, Amazon EBS provides the ability to create point-in-time, consistent snapshots of volumes that are then stored to Amazon S3.
Amazon EBS is well suited for databases, as well as many other applications that require running a file system or access to raw block-level storage. As Amazon EC2 instances are started and stopped, the information saved in your database or application is preserved in much the same way it is with traditional physical servers. Amazon EBS can be accessed through the latest Amazon EC2 APIs, and is now available in public beta.
We hope you enjoy this new feature and we look forward to your feedback.
Sincerely,
The Amazon EC2 team
So this is indeed good news and removes the biggest con I mention about the EC2 platform!
4 comments
Yeah great article! Thanks
by Peet on October 26, 2009 at 10:46 am. #
Rusty,
I share your concerns about performance trade offs as well. I received an email from RightScale earlier today as well claiming this:
“EBS is a new Amazon Web Service that provides reliable mountable storage volumes that operate separately from EC2 instances – but at local disk speeds.”
However, I have not had the opportunity to confirm this just yet. The best solution for optimal performance currently is just to keep as much data cached in RAM as possible, crude but effective.
- Justin
by Justin Leider on August 21, 2008 at 2:31 pm. #
ESB sounds terrific and provides a great persistence foundation for EC2, however I’m not convinced I would want to run a web facing database on EBS volumes. Mostly because I suspect the IO’s per second are orders of magnitude slower then SAN or iSCSI interfaces. Granted, a large number of the database should be in cache, but given how sensitive Databases are to IO performance this seems like a big risk.
by Rusty on August 21, 2008 at 2:25 pm. #
[...] UPDATE 8/21/08: Amazon releases persistent storage. [...]
by Running your own hardware Vs. EC2 and RightScale « Justin D. Leider’s Think Tank on August 21, 2008 at 10:59 am. #