Day 18 - Volume Upgrades

AWS Cost Optimisation Advent Calendar 2024

3 min read time

#aws #ebs

Welcome to day 18 of the unofficial AWS Cost Optimisation Advent Calendar 2024, where every day we will be sharing new tips or tricks to help you optimise your cloud costs before Christmas 2024.

Today we are going to talk about the cost benefit of upgrading your volumes from GP2 to GP3.

What are GP2 and GP3?

GP2 and GP3 are types of Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The main differences between them are related to performance, pricing and burst capacity.

1. Performance:

   • GP2: Performance is tied to the size of the volume. The baseline performance is 3 IOPS (input/output operations per second) per GB, up to a maximum of 16,000 IOPS. The max throughput is 250 MiB/s.
   • GP3: Offers better performance flexibility. You can independently configure IOPS and throughput, irrespective of the storage capacity. The max throughput is 1,000 MiB/s.

2. Pricing:

   • GP2: Pricing is based on the volume size; the larger storage you buy, the more IOPS are available.
   • GP3: The storage and I/O performance are billed separately, making it easier to optimize costs. You pay for the storage, provisioned IOPS, and provisioned throughput.

3. Burst Capacity:

   • GP2: It provides burst capacity, allowing for small volumes to burst up to 3,000 IOPS for short periods.
   • GP3: There is no burst capacity, but smaller volumes start with a baseline of 3,000 IOPS, which is the maximum burst capacity for GP2.

Amazon provide their own comparison here

Why upgrade to GP3?

In summary, GP3 provides a faster baseline speed and more flexibility to configure it's performance.

In addition, GP3 is generally cheaper than GP2 for the same performance. This is because you can provision the exact IOPS and throughput you need, rather than being tied to the volume size.

The calculation can seem complex, but AWS provides a calculator to help you estimate the cost of your EBS volumes.

It is likely that 9 times out of 10 GP3 will come out cheaper and/or more performant than GP2.

How to upgrade to GP3?

Upgrading a volume to GP3 is a simple process. You can do it via the AWS Console simply by choosing the volume, and selecting Modify Volume. You can then change from GP2 to GP3 and AWS will handle the rest in the background.

There should be no downtime but performance may be degraded whilst the data copies over. Therefore it is recommended to do this during maintenance windows or quieter periods.

Conclusion

Upgrading from GP2 to GP3 generally has a cost and performance benefit.

Take a look at all your GP2 volumes today and see if any could benefit from a performance boost and a cost saving.

As always, if you need any help with this contact our friendly team.

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