AWS EBS storage comparing gp2 and gp3. (performance and cost)

January 22, 2024 at 9:57 am

Nikos Nikoloutsakos

Ansys Employee

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides storage volumes for use with EC2 instances which are deployed on Ansys Gateway.
EBS provides various volume types, which differ in performance characteristics and price.

Here we are discussing general-purpose Solid-state drive (SSD) volumes. SSD-backed volumes are optimized for transactional workloads involving frequent read/write operations with small I/O size, where the dominant performance attribute is IOPS, and are suitable for Ansys workloads.

General Purpose SSD volumes are offered in two types:

gp2
gp3 (current)

Both balance price and performance, where gp3 is the latest generation offered.
The main difference between the two is how performance is scaled:

gp2 automatically scales performance based on the size of the virtual disk - as the disk gets bigger, the disk throughput and IOPs increase as well. (3 IOPs per GiB)
Volumes smaller than 1 TiB can also burst up to 3,000 IOPS for a limited period 30 minutes up to 2 hours depending on the disk size.
gp3 allows for separate control of disk size from disk performance - meaning that you can better optimize the performance vs cost to meet your use case.This means that you can provision the required performance without needing to provision additional block storage capacity. Additionally, gp3 volumes offer a 20 percent lower price per GiB than gp2 volumes.
Additionally gp3 volumes offer a 20 percent lower price per GiB than gp2 volumes.
It is possible to provision IOPS flexibly, so if more IOPS is required, modify it manually, this can be done using elastic volume operations described here:Amazon EBS Elastic Volumes - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

gp2 provides a maximum of 250MiB/s throughput (with volumes that are 334 GiB and larger) , whereas gp3 has the capability to provide throughput up to 1000 MiB/s.

Table Summary volumes in the US East (N. Virginia) Region (Comparing Amazon EBS volume types gp2 and gp3 - Amazon EMR)

Volume type	gp3	gp2
Volume size	1 GiB – 16 TiB	1 GiB – 16 TiB
Default/Baseline IOPS	3000	3 IOPS/GiB (minimum 100 IOPS) to a maximum of 16,000 IOPS. Volumes smaller than 1 TiB can also burst up to 3,000 IOPS.
Max IOPS/volume	16,000	16,000
Default/Baseline throughput	125 MiB/s	Throughput limit is between 128 MiB/s and 250 MiB/s, depending on the volume size.
Max throughput/volume	1,000 MiB/s	250 MiB/s
Price	$0.08/GiB-month 3,000 IOPS free and $0.005/provisioned IOPS-month over 3,000; 125 MiB/s free and $0.04/provisioned MiB/s-month over 125MiB/s	$0.10/GiB-month