AWS Knowledge
Understanding Amazon Elastic Block Store Pricing 2025
Stuart Lundberg
Jan 9, 2025
Amazon Web Services remains at the forefront of providing cloud computing services, giving innovative solutions to companies across all industries. One of the unique services within AWS Elastic Block Store which is a block-level storage service that is paired with high-performing Amazon EC2 instances. Although its features are tailored to offer maximum efficiency, not many businesses find it easy to grasp the pricing model for Amazon EBS.
This blog breaks down the Amazon EBS pricing model into actionable measures so you can gain insight into the pricing model. Whether you as a cloud engineer maintaining infrastructure or a startup founder, this blog will help you understand EBS costs and how to manage them, thus potentially saving you up to 20% on your cloud storage costs.
What Is Amazon Elastic Block Store?
Amazon Elastic Block Store service is designed to use alongside Amazon EC2 instances allowing users to have block-level storage in a scalable manner which ensures data persistence and high availability. An easy way to conceptualize EBS is as a hard disk you can attach to your EC2 instances where you can save operating systems, applications or even large databases.
Key Features and Benefits
Scalability: You can easily provision storage as your application grows.
Durability: Guarantees 99.999% availability by automatically replicating data within an availability zone.
Customization: Provides different volume types catered to cost and performance.
Snapshots: Practises incremental backup to avoid data duplication and save on storage space.
Flexibility: Suits both transactional applications and big data warehouses equally well.
Why EBS Over Traditional Storage Solutions?
Unlike on-premises storage, EBS is fully managed, offering elastic scalability, pay-as-you-go pricing, and automatic replication. It eliminates the hardware maintenance headaches, giving teams more freedom to focus on core business objectives.
How Does Amazon EBS Work?
(Image Source: Amazon EBS)
Amazon EBS is a block storage service with a huge scale and high performance that works with Amazon’s EC2 instances. It is similar to a virtual hard drive that enables users to persist the data even after stopping or destroying the EC2 instance, allowing the user to use it as persistent storage. As a result, EBS is perfect for hosting non-specialized hardware demanding applications such as databases and data analytics systems.
Types of EBS Volumes
Amazon EBS has different volume types that are capable of dealing with specific workloads and performance needs:
General Purpose SSD (gp2, gp3):
It is the best for generic workloads which includes application development, system boot volumes, and general purpose tasks.
gp3 is a newer version of gp2 and is more efficient and cost-effective.
Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1, io2):
It is designed for applications with high I/O performance requirements, like large-scale databases or critical financial systems.
io2 Block Express offers the most data durability, reliability, and performance for the most demanding workloads.
Throughput Optimized HDD (st1): Suitable for an application needing large scale sequential data access like big data, log processing and other data warehousing applications with very high throughput requirements.
Cold HDD (sc1): A cost-efficient option used to store data that is not accessed frequently like archives and backups., where performance is less of a priority.
Use Cases Across Industries
E-commerce: Managing transactions log files and databases.
Healthcare: Managing safe storage of patient records.
Big Data Workloads: Handling analytics pipelines and data warehousing.
Startups: Creating cost-effective, scalable applications with minimal infrastructure.
Deep Dive Into Amazon EBS Pricing Structure
Amazon EBS pricing follows a pay-as-you-go model, where prices vary depending on factors like volume type, provisioned resources, and region. As prices differ in regions, we will consider the US East (N. Virginia) in this pricing example. So let's look into how the EBS pricing model functions:
Volume Storage Costs
General Purpose SSD (gp3):$0.08/GB per month, with free baseline throughput of up to 125 MB/s and 3,000 IOPS.
Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2):$0.125/GB per month, with additional IOPS charges beyond the free baseline.
Throughput Optimized HDD (st1):$0.045/GB per month.
Cold HDD (sc1):$0.015/GB per month, ideal for rarely accessed data.
Snapshot Costs
EBS Snapshots are incremental backups stored in Amazon S3:
Standard Tier: $0.05 per GB-month.
Archive Tier (for long-term backups): $0.0125 per GB-month.
Fast Snapshot Restore
While snapshot creation is free, Fast Snapshot Restore for instant recovery costs:
$0.75 per DSU hour.
Data Transfer Costs
Data transfers within the same availability zone are free.
Transfers across regions or availability zones incur additional charges.
Additional Factors Influencing Cost
Provisioned IOPS for SSD Volumes (io2 and io1): E.g., $0.065 per provisioned IOPS-month.
Throughput Costs for gp3:E.g., $0.04 per provisioned MB/s-month above the free baseline.
Additional Pricing Benefits for Amazon EBS
EBS goes way beyond simple flexibility with the ability to cut costs further by bringing other specific advantages:
Free Tier for New Users: AWS Offers 30 GB of EBS storage, 2 million I/O operations, and 1 GB of snapshots available free for first 12 months.
Discounts for Long-Term Commitments: Savings Plans or Reserved Instances provide discounted pricing for consistent workloads.
gp3 Migration Benefits: Changing from gp2 to gp3 volumes can cut storage costs by up to 20% with no change to performance.
Case Study: ProtectWise Achieves 95% Storage Cost Reduction with AWS
ProtectWise needed a cost-effective, high-performance solution to manage the massive storage demands of its Apache Cassandra deployment, handling 50 terabytes of compressed network data every day.
Steps Taken:
Moved to a stateless storage architecture using Amazon EBS and Amazon S3 storage services.
Adjusted data storage and retrieval processes to reduce costs while maintaining storage performance.
The Results:
Reached storage expenses that are 95% lower, incurring costs of around $1 for every $20 of what was spent previously.
Search performance was improved and built a new standard in the security industry, allowing new rapid data retrieval in 1 to 3 second.
Not only has AWS reduced costs by roughly 30% on average each month over the last 2 years, but it has also helped ProtectWise provide unmatched service. "Nobody else in the security industry can do this. It blows our customers away," says Gene Stevens, Co-founder and CTO of ProtectWise.
How to Reduce Amazon EBS Costs: Tools and Tips
Select the Right Volume Type: Select the one that fits your workload best. For general purpose workloads, gp3 is preferable because it is cheaper and more efficient than gp2. For high-scale, high-throughput work like data processing, st1 is the best choice since it is optimized for sequential I/O.
Optimize Your Snapshots: Old snapshots might pile up and needlessly increase expenses, even though regular backups are necessary for any business. Setting up data lifecycle management policies is one way to automate cleanups to ensure there are no outdated snapshots being held on to.
Monitor Resource Usage: Storage is often wasted when EBS volumes go under-utilized. AWS CloudWatch can track storage activities while cost explorer can detect idle or underused volumes. Eliminate and scale down the unused resources to save costs.
Leverage Automation for Efficiency: Use tools like AWS Lambda to automate routine tasks such as deleting unattached EBS volumes or resizing volumes that are over-provisioned capacity. This leaves waste and ensures you’re only paying for what you actually use.
Cost-Efficient Architecture: Keep storage and compute resources in the same availability zone to avoid unnecessary costs from cross-region or cross-zone data transfers. Planning your architecture with regions and zones in mind can save significant money.
Conclusion
Getting a handle on Amazon EBS pricing is essential for boosting your cloud infrastructure’s efficiency while keeping costs under control. By choosing the right EBS volume types, managing snapshots smartly, and following cost-saving best practices, you can strike the perfect balance between performance and budget.
Need help with cost optimization for your EBS? Dive into the AWS Pricing Calculator to better manage your cloud expenses.
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