AWS EBS storage balancing size versus throughput
One of my teams is rolling out a new application in AWS on EC2 instances where the operating system runs on an EBS drive. We selected one of the M3 machines that came with SSDs. The application makes moderate use of disk I/O. Our benchmarks were pretty disappointing. It turns out we really didn't understand what kind of I/O we had requested and where we had actually put our data. The Root Drive The root drive on an EC2 instance can be SSDs or Magnetic based on the type of machine selected. All additional mounted/persistent disk drives on that machine will probably be of the same type. This is an SSD but it is a network drive. EBS disks IOPS and MB/S are provisioned exactly as described in the EC2 documentation. The most common GP2 SSDs have a burst IOPS limit and a sustained IOPS limit. They also have a maximum MB/S transfer rate. Both the sustained IOPS limit and the maximum transfer rate are affected by the size of the provisioned disk. Larger disks can sustain