New EBS (AWS) volume type: General Purpose (SSD)
It looks like Amazon has released a third EBS volume type, and renamed "Standard" volumes to "Magnetic". General Purpose is currently the default type when launching "Create Volume" in the EC2 Web UI (https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home), which provides the following documentation:
"General Purpose (SSD) volumes provide the ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS per volume, independent of volume size, to meet the performance needs of most applications and also deliver a consistent baseline of 3 IOPS/GiB. Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes can deliver up to 4000 IOPS and are best for EBS-optimized instances. Magnetic volumes, previously called 'standard volumes', deliver approximately 100 IOPS on average, with a best effort ability to burst to hundreds of IOPS."
The EBS Pricing page (http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/) currently makes no mention of General Purpose (SSD) volumes. Is it supposed to be all smooth sailing launching gp2 instances from standard snapshots and vice versa ? It may be just me but I've had really weird and serious new errors today in us-east-1 launching new instances, or even starting previously stopped ones with no changes to the instance whatsoever ! General slowness, "reachability" health check failing, with the system log showing that the kernel couldn't be uncompressed, maybe because the bootloader couldn't find the root device in the first place ? I'm not using custom kernels at all. The timing is too strange for it to be a coincidence, but nothing on the AWS status page. Official announcement just been released. http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ssd-backed-elastic-block... Interesting. I can create a gp2 volume through the console, but not through CloudFormation. See https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=154543&ts.... For some bizarre reason the new SSD types are not supported with Autoscaling groups. We can look into this if you can provide the stack id. Thanks, but I'll contact AWS support through our account. It'll be interesting to see how much CloudCorset will be able to impact/improve performance by reducing the number of IOPS that goes to the EBS storage backend.
http://www.cloudcorset.com/?ref=Tie98
UPDATE_FAILED - gp2 is invalid. Valid volume types are standard and io1.