Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances use Elastic Block Storage (EBS) as a root volume as well as an additional data store for applications. It is necessary to select a proper EBS volume type depending upon the workload to achieve high performance and the right approach to backup EBS volumes reqularly in production environments. We need a solution to backup and restore application data from EBS volume snapshots at any point of time and we should not pay an unnecessary cost for archiving the older snapshots. This article covers choosing the right EBS volume type for your application and provides a mechanism to handle EBS snapshots using serverless technology.
EBS Volume Types
Amazon EBS provides different volume types which have different performance characteristics and cost models. We can choose the volume type based on our application requirements (the type of the workload) to achieve higher performance as well as saving overall storage cost. EBS volume is available in two different categories, SSD-backed volumes and HDD-backed volumes. SSD backed volumes are used when the workload is I/O intensive, like transactional workloads where frequent read-writes happens in an application. Its performance is rated in IOPS. HDD-backed volumes are used when an application requires continuous read and write to the disk at a cheaper rate with high throughput. Its performance is rated in throughput MiB/s.