Amazon EBS SAN for the cloud

21 Aug 2008

Amazon has just released their latest addition to the cloud offerings: EBS or "Elastic Block Store". The pricing looks very reasonable at 10 cents per Gigabyte, and 10 cents for every millionth I/O operation. It also comes with some juicy features like the ability to create a snapshot to S3 at any point in time, and then create another EBS volume from that snapshot.

The SAN like storage mounts are (only) available in a given "Availability Zone". Nothing specific is mentioned about distributed file systems like GFS, so that is something I'll be looking into ASAP. Like a regular volume you can create several EBS volumes and do your own software raid on top of that.

There are also some interesting scenarios around the snapshot facility such as having one "master" EBS volume in the designated "write" availability and replicating out to several "slave" availability zones in geographically disparate regions.

Performance seems inline with high end RAID arrays:

To recap:

Price: $0.1 per GB Performance: Features: Reliability, Snapshots, Traditional Posix filesystem