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AWS (Amazon Web Services) has announced the new storage service’s release with more durability and IOP per GiB, dubbed io2. It is faster than io1 and will be available at the same price. Jeff Barr, the chief evangelist at AWS, said that io2 volumes designs are specifically tailored to deliver 99.999% durability.

The specs mean that they are now up to 200x more reliable than a regular disk drive. At the same time, they are increasing the IOPS per GiB ratio to 500 IOPS per GiB.

This will push the EBS volumes to deliver high-performance results and reduce or eliminate any overkill provisions you may have made before, to coax a better performance out of the older generations. 

A slew of encouraging speed

The EBS volumes are tied to AWS compute instances, but they are not all the same. They differ in characteristics, performance, and price. The SSD-based volumes receive their ratings based on IOPS and HDD, based on throughput (MiB per second).

The new io2 volume types include:

  • General purpose SSD (gp2), up to 16,000 IOPS
  • Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1 and io2) up to 64,000 IOPS (provides low latency and high throughput)
  • Throughput optimized HDD (st1) up to 500MiB per second.
  • Cold HDD (sc1) up to 250 MiB per second
  • Magnetic (previous generations) up to 90 MiB per second and 200 IOPS

Cold HDD is best for infrequent use, while Optimized HDD is best for streaming workloads.

Best for databases and high performance

Barr said that the io2 volumes are significant for critical databases and workloads and fit into high-performance situations with ease. SAP HANA, IBM DB2, Apache Cassandra, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL users will benefit significantly from these volumes.

Now, it is possible to access peak performance and lower costs at the same time.

Tip: AWS emphasises the importance of a Well Architected Framework