Maximizing performance for high-intensity workloads using Amazon EBS (STG329)

Summary of the Video Transcription

Overview of Amazon EBS

  • Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a network-attached storage service that provides high durability, availability, and performance for a wide variety of workloads.
  • EBS offers different volume types, including SSD-based (e.g., gp3, io2 Block Express) and HDD-based volumes.
  • gp3 is the most popular general-purpose volume type, providing baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s throughput.
  • Customers can use the Elastic Volumes service to scale up IOPS, throughput, or storage capacity of their EBS volumes as needed.

Deep Dive on io2 Block Express

Key Characteristics of io2 Block Express

  • Designed for mission-critical workloads that require very high IOPS (up to 265,000 IOPS) and low latency (consistently sub-millisecond).
  • Provides the highest durability among EBS volume types, with 99.999% durability.
  • Supports all Nitro-based EC2 instances, offering 4x the throughput and 100x the durability of io1 volumes, at 50% lower cost.

Epic Use Case

  • Epic is a leading electronic health record (EHR) system with high transactional IOPS requirements.
  • AWS was able to provide 256,000 IOPS per io2 Block Express volume, and up to 420,000 IOPS when striping multiple volumes per instance.
  • This allowed Epic and its customers, such as Baptist Memorial Healthcare, to consolidate their on-premises deployments and achieve 20-75% performance improvements in the cloud.

SAP HANA Use Case

  • SAP HANA is an in-memory database that requires high throughput for fast data loading during startup or maintenance events.
  • io2 Block Express is recommended for mission-critical SAP HANA deployments, as it can provide the high throughput (up to 4 GiB/s) needed for large 256 KiB block sizes.
  • Nissan in Europe was able to achieve a 63% performance improvement by moving their SAP HANA workload to io2 Block Express, in addition to leveraging EBS Snapshots for consistent database recovery.

Performance Optimization and Monitoring

  • To maximize performance on io2 Block Express, customers can leverage volume striping and take advantage of EBS I/O merging to combine sequential small I/Os into larger 256 KiB operations.
  • AWS has introduced new CloudWatch metrics and real-time I/O performance statistics to help customers monitor and optimize the performance of their EBS volumes, including identifying any throttling or instance-level constraints.

Key Takeaways

  • io2 Block Express is designed for mission-critical workloads that require very high IOPS, low latency, and high durability.
  • Customers can leverage volume striping to achieve even higher IOPS and throughput, while being mindful of the impact on overall durability.
  • AWS provides various tools and metrics to help customers monitor and optimize the performance of their EBS volumes, including identifying any performance bottlenecks.

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