GP3 volumes – a new EBS volume type
UPDATE: 11 Nov 2022, GP3 disks are finally available for RDS now too!
This early Christmas gift from AWS was announced at AWS re:Invent 2020 earlier this month and needs to be on your radar – GP3 is a new EBS volume type that’s faster, more flexible AND 20% cheaper than GP2.
All database platforms are sensitive to storage performance and SQL Server is no different so this is a great quick win for EC2 deployments.
GP2 volumes were introduced in 2014 bringing SSD performance benefits at a price suitable for general purpose workloads. Performance scales with the size of the volume at 3 IOPS per GB with a minimum of 100 IOPS and maximum throughput between 128MB and 250MB. To increase performance you need to increase the size of the volume.
With GP3 volumes the performance baseline starts at 3000 IOPS and 125MB/s and is de-coupled from the size of the volume enabling you to scale performance independently of volume size.
With GP2 bigger volumes get better performance
With GP3 performance is independent of volume size
Migrating to GP3 is a straightforward and online operation achieved by simply modifying the volume although it will take some time to migrate large volumes.
Migrating to GP3 is an online operation
GP3 is supported for the OS volumes as well as data volumes but best of all it’s cheaper than GP2!
GP3 volumes are cheaper than GP2
GP3 is available in all AWS Regions and I can’t see any reason not to migrate all your GP2 volumes. It may even give you pause to consider whether you need those expensive io1/io2 volumes for SQL Server anymore.
