For decades, AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) have been running with Elastic Block Storage (EBS), that is very great service providing HDD and SSD volumes, each designed for a particular use case.
Recently, by the end of July 2021, AWS annouced the general availability of its cloud-based storage area network (SAN) offering, the Amazon EBS IO2 Block Express Volumes that provide 4x higher throughput, IOPS and capacity than IO2 volumes.
In the previous re:Invent 2020, the giant tech previewed this service as a SAN offering for enterprise. It is designed according to AWS to meet the requirements of the largest, most I/O-intensive, mission-critical deployments of Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, SAP HANA, and SAS Analytics on AWS.
The volumes are now generally available first for Amazon EC2 R5b instance type powered by AWS Nitro System, which is optimized for highest EBS performance. Support for other instances besides R5b is coming soon. In addition, with the GA release, the io2 Block Express volumes now also support IO2 features such as Multi-Attach and Elastic Volumes.
Users now can create IO2 Block Express volume in AWS Console, CLI and even SDK/CDK. All the EC2 creation process is as usual for all users. Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes can be an alternative to enterprises for their on-premise solution.
Currently, IO2 Block Express volumes are available in all regions where R5b is available - which include US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt). In addition, the company announced that support for more regions is coming soon.
Note that AWS bills the IO2- and IO2 Express volumes the same way and recommends using tags to identify costs associated with IO2 Block Express volumes. Pricing details of IO2 volumes are available on the Amazon EBS pricing page.
