Presenter Name
Presenter Title
Month Day, Year
Understanding Amazon EBS Availability and Performance
Miles Ward Senior Manager, Solutions Architecture
Agenda
• Overview of Elastic Block Store
• Some key concepts: block size, IOPS, throughput
• Performance
• Availability
Storage Options on AWS
Block Storage (Elastic Block Store)
Object Storage (S3, Glacier)
Use for: • Access to raw
unformatted block level storage
• Persistent Storage
Use for: • Pictures, videos,
highly durable media storage
• Cold storage for long-term archive
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Elastic Block Storage: Persistent Storage for EC2
Feature Details
High performance file system
Mount EBS as drives and format as required
Flexible size Volumes from 1GB to 1TB in size
Secure Private to your instances
Available Replicated within an Availability Zone
Backups Volumes can be snapshotted for point in time restore
Monitoring Detailed metrics captured via Cloud Watch
What are some of our customers doing with EBS?
Enterprises
Enterprise workloads are built on block
storage
Oracle, SAP, Microsoft
Applications
Convenient, cost-effective,
reliable file server
Gaming/Social/ Mobile/Education
Very high performance
and consistent IO
for NoSQL and relational
DBs
Marketing / Analytics
Fast sequential IO
access
Key EBS concepts
• Standard EBS Volumes
• Provisioned IOPS EBS
Volumes
• Block Size
• Queue Depth
• Snapshots
Standard and Provisioned IOPS Volume Types
Standard Volumes Provisioned IOPS Volumes
Optimized for Workloads with low or moderate IOPS needs and occasional bursts.
Transactional workloads requiring consistent IOPS.
Volume Attributes
Up to 1 TB, average 100 IOPS per volume. Best effort performance. Can be striped together for larger size and higher IOPS.
Up to 1TB, 2,000 IOPS per volume. Consistent IOPS. Can be striped together for larger size and higher IOPS.
Workloads File server, Log processing, Websites, Analytics, Boot, etc.
Business applications, MongoDB, SQL server, MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, etc.
Introducing Provisioned IOPS Volumes
❶ Select a new type of Provisioned IOPS volumes
❸ Specify the number of IOs per second your application needs, up to 4000 PIOPS per volume. The volume will deliver the specified IO per second.
❷ Specify the volume capacity
$ ec2-create-volume --size 500 --availability-zone us-east-1b --type
io1 –iops 2000
Consistent IO performance
Provisioned IOPS volumes deliver within 10% of the IOPS performance 99.9% of the time over a given year.
Stab
le
Testing random 4K reads
EBS
PIOPS
+ SSD
Before PIOPS:
After PIOPS:
End-to-end latency
When should I use Provisioned IOPS?
• Provisioned IOPS volumes are designed for running transactional applications that require high and consistent IO: o Relational Databases
o NoSQL Databases, e.g. MongoDB
o Productivity applications, e.g. Microsoft Exchange
o Enterprise Applications
• Standard volumes are designed for boot volumes, running applications with moderate and bursty IO, and sequential IO access
IOPS vs. Throughput
One input operation or “block”
The network throughput available on the connection between EC2 and EBS
The IOPS provisioned
IOPS vs. Throughput
Bigger than 16k…
Greater than the mbps limit…
Greater than the IOPS provisioned…
A little math
• Networks are in mbit/s, disks tend to be in MB/s.
• 1000mbit/s = 125 MB/s
• 500mbit/s = 67.5 MB/s
• Blocks/ IOs are in KB
• ~7,500 16KB blocks fit in 1000mbit/s
• ~30,000 4KB blocks fit in 1000mbit/s
Block Size
Queue Depth
Maintain a number of pending I/O requests to get the most out of your Provisioned IOPS volume. The volumes must maintain an average queue length of 1 (rounded up to the nearest whole number) for every 200 provisioned IOPS in a minute
Performance
• Architecting for Performance
– Avoid IO saturation
– EBS Optimized
– Avoid throughput saturation
– RAID
• Achieving Consistent Performance
– Pre-warm PIOPS volumes
– Plan for snapshot
• Snapshot Performance
Architecting for Performance: Use EBS Optimized Instances
USING Provisioned IOPS Volumes
❶ Select a new type of Provisioned IOPS volumes
❸ SPECIFY ENOUGH IOPS!!
❷ Specify the volume capacity
$ ec2-create-volume –size 400 --availability-zone us-east-1b --type
io1 –iops 4000
Architecting for Performance: Avoid Throughput Saturation
• Example:
– Cluster Compute instance types have 2Gb/s bandwidth to EBS, more than 8 PIOPS volumes at 2000 IOPS each will saturate 2 Gb/s network
– EBS Optimized M3.2Xlarge instance has 1 Gb/s bandwidth dedicated to EBS, more than 16 PIOPS volumes at 500 IOPS each will saturate the 1 GB/s network
RAID
• RAID 10: provides increased redundancy
– Replace EBS volume without application downtime
– Increases read throughput
– However, 50% reduction of provisioned aggregate write performance
– E.g., MongoDB optimized around the benefits of RAID 10
• RAID 0:
– All EBS volumes are replicated in the same AZ
– Increased throughput
Achieving Consistent Performance: Pre-warm PIOPS volumes
• There is a 5 to 50 percent performance reduction in IOPS when you first access the data on a PIOPS volume.
• Write to all blocks on volumes before first use
– $ dd of=/dev/md0 if=/dev/null
Snapshots
• Create snapshots (backups) of any Amazon EBS volume.
• The volume need not be attached to a running instance in order to take a
snapshot.
• These snapshots can be used to create multiple new Amazon EBS volumes,
expand the size of a volume, or move volumes across Availability Zones.
• The snapshots can be shared with specific AWS accounts or made public.
• You can use this functionality to increase the size of an existing volume, rapidly
replicate development and testing environments, or use Snapshot Copy to copy
snapshots to another region for disaster recovery or regional expansion.
Snapshot Performance
• To improve snapshot performance
– Increase the frequency of snapshots
Achieving Consistent Performance: Plan for Snapshot
To minimize the impact of snapshots on performance of a master node:
– create snapshots from a read replica of your data
– Plan snapshots during off-peak usage
– Use cross-region snapshot copy to keep distant regional copies for HA / low latency local access
Performance – Minimum production DB scale
• Always use Elastic Block Store (EBS) o Significant write cache o Great random IO performance o Enhanced durability compared to instance stores
Performance – production scale
• Use Provisioned IOPS for all workloads targeting above 100 IOPS.
• Move up to higher bandwidth instance types (m1.xlarge, c1.xlarge, m2.4xlarge)
• Increase EBS volume size to >= 400 GB
• Increase number of volumes in RAID set
Performance – Extra-large scale
• Leverage Cluster Compute instance types o More bandwidth to EBS o Ex. CC2 will make excellent primary nodes,
particularly when paired with a large number of EBS volumes (= 8)
• Improve RAID configuration with: o effective_io_concurrency = # of stripes in RAID
set
• Amazon Provisioned IOPS o http://copperegg.com/amazon-provisioned-iops-ebs/
• Benchmarking EBS performance: o http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSPerformance.html
• Stratalux: Putting Amazon’s Provisioned IOPS to the test o http://www.stratalux.com/2012/08/09/putting-amazon’s-provisioned-iops-to-the-test/
Get started on EBS
today! aws.amazon.com/ebs
Questions: e-mail: [email protected]
@milesward
