Amazon’s AWS Re:invent conference could be described as overwhelming – even without a physical audience of 60,000 people swarming across a venue that spans six different hotels. To kick off this year's virtual event, AWS CEO Andy Jassy gave a three-hour keynote during which he announced 24 new products and updates, and this includes four additions to its storage services that could easily be mistaken for a family of Star Wars droids.

The new storage services include Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) io2 Block Express volumes; Amazon EBS Gp3 volumes; two new Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Intelligent-Tiering automatic data archiving tiers in Archive Access and Deep Archive Access; and multi-destination Amazon S3 Replication.

“2020 has been a big year for EBS customers,” said Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, AWS' VP of storage during a re:Invent session. EBS is a block storage service designed for use with Amazon EC2 instances for both throughput and transaction-intensive workloads of all sizes. “The way to think about all of the launches for EBS is that we are reinventing durable existing storage for Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances by building the first Storage Area Network (SAN) in the cloud with our EBS io2 storage volume.” 

Tomsen Bukovec said over 90% of the company’s roadmap has been focused on listening to customers who want services to help them avoid data center capital acquisition costs that hold operational overhead and scalability challenges. AWS storage can offer the “simplicity of the cloud,” she added. “You'll see that same focus on innovation across cost performance and capability in our file storage services as well.”

Amazon io2 Block Express 

Amazon introduced EBS io2 Block Express, a storage service that provides more durability and IOPs per gigabyte (GB) – at the same price as the existing io1 volumes. According to the cloud giant, it will boost performance for SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and Apache Cassandra workloads as it provides 99.999% of durability up to 256,000 IOPS more than general purpose EBS volumes. 

The EBS Block Express is architected to utilize advanced communication protocols implemented as part of the AWS Nitro System, which is the underlying platform for EC2. This translates to improved durability and IOPS per GB and makes Block Express “a great fit for I/O-hungry and latency-sensitive applications, including high-performance, business-critical workloads,” Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS wrote in a blog post. 

In the past, customers have deferred to striping multiple io2 volumes together or on-premises SANs – a set of disks accessed over the local network – to meet their performance needs. High overhead costs, complex forecasting and management, and inflexible networking capacity have put SANs in a bit of a gray zone: too expensive to deploy but too powerful to ignore.

“Customers told us they wanted the power of a SAN, but in the cloud, which hasn’t existed – until now,” Tomsen Bukovec said. 

EBS io2 Block Express is currently in preview and will be updated with additional SAN features in the coming months. 

Amazon EBS gp3 Volumes

Amazon offers two flavors of EBS volume types: solid-state drive (SSD)-backed volumes, which are optimized for IOPS with write-once, read-many workloads; and hybrid hard drive (HHD)-backed volumes, which are optimized for throughput and large streaming workloads.

Now in its seventh variation, EBS gp3 introduces a new SSD EBS volume that enables customers to provision performance independent of storage capacity at a 20% lower price per GB than existing gp2 volume types, allowing customers to pay only for the resources they need, Tomsen Bukovec said. This addresses a scalability pain point in the existing SSD gp2 volumes that tie performance to storage capacity. 

Customers currently using gp2 can migrate EBS volumes to gp3 using Amazon EBS Elastic Volumes, an existing feature of Amazon EBS. Elastic Volumes allows users to modify the volume type, IOPS, and throughput of existing EBS volumes without interrupting Amazon EC2 instances.

The gp3 volume type is currently available for all AWS regions.

Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering Automatic Data Archiving

As enterprise data continues to scale, the volume of storage required and protection scales with it. This data growth is driving many organizations to re-examine their current data storage practices, looking for ways to limit rising cost, risk, and complexity of data protection.

The new S3 Intelligent Tiering storage class will automatically move content in S3 into the cheapest storage system. S3 Intelligent Tiering storage class features two access tiers: frequent access and infrequent access and supports automatic data archiving to the new Archive Access and Deep Archive Access storage tiers.  

For a monitoring and automation fee, S3 Intelligent-Tiering monitors access patterns and moves objects that have not been accessed for 30 consecutive days to the infrequent access tier. Content that has not been accessed for 90 will automatically be moved to the Archive access tier, and after 180 days to the Deep Archive access tier, thus reducing total cost of ownership by up to 95%, the vendor claims. 

The new intelligent archive tiers share the same functionality, performance, and pricing of Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive. Customers can opt-in to one or both archive access tiers, and configure them at the bucket, prefix, or object tag level.

S3 Intelligent-Tiering’s new archive access tiers are available now in all AWS Regions.

Amazon S3 Multi-Destination Replication

Finally, the vendor introduced multi-destination support in Amazon S3 replication. The new feature gives customers the ability to replicate data to multiple S3 buckets simultaneously in the same AWS Region or any number of AWS Regions. 

“Before this launch, if you needed to have multiple copies of your data in different S3 buckets, you had to build your own S3 replication service by monitoring S3 events, identifying created objects, and using AWS Lambda functions to copy objects to each destination bucket,” explained Marcia Villalba, senior developer advocate for AWS, in a blog post. 

Customers can also specify different storage classes for different destinations to save on storage costs and meet data compliance requirements.

Amazon S3 Multi-Destination Replication is currently available.