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Amazon Web Services introduces EBS: Elastic Block Store

August 21st, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

Amazon is betting heavily on software and services on the cloud. The company today launched the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), a new persistent storage feature for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon EC2 is an infrastructure service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. 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).

Users can get started with EBS at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2.

Here’s what is available as of now and the cost of using EBS

EBS volumes from 1 GB up to 1 TB.
Beta customers can create 20 EBS volumes with a total of 20 Terabytes.
EBS costs storage plus I/O requests at $0.10 per GB per month & $0.10 per million I/O requests.
EBS functionality is available via EC2 API using any number of tools, including command line and Elasticfox.

As an example, a medium sized website database might be 100 GB in size and expect to average 100 I/Os per second over the course of a month. This would translate to $10 per month in storage costs (100 GB x $0.10/month), and approximately $26 per month in request costs (~2.6 million seconds/month x 100 I/O per second * $0.10 per million I/O).

Prior to EBS, storage within an Amazon EC2 instances were tied to the instance itself so when the instance was terminated, the data within the instance was lost. Now with Amazon EBS, users can allocate persistent storage volumes that are independent from Amazon EC2 instances. Additionally, for backups, Amazon EBS provides the ability to create point-in-time, consistent snapshots of volumes that are then stored to Amazon S3.

This is great news for developers and small businesses alike who don’t want to invest in infrastructure but need scalable storage for their applications. It is well suited for databases, as well as other applications that require running a file system or access to raw block-level storage.

“For over two years, we’ve focused on delivering a cost-effective, web scale infrastructure to developers, giving them complete flexibility in the kinds of solutions they deliver,” said Peter De Santis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. “Persistent block storage has been among the top requests of developers using Amazon EC2, and we’re excited to deliver Amazon Elastic Block Storage designed specifically for our cloud-based, elastic computing environment.”

For Amazon Web Services including S3, EC2 and now EBS, visit the website at http://aws.amazon.com.