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The main difference between gp2 and gp3, however, is gp3’s decoupling of IOPS, throughput, and volume size. This flexibility – the ability to configure each piece independently – is where the savings come in.
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On the opposite end of the spectrum, gp2 is quite inflexible. Sizing a gp2 volume involves considering both the storage and throughput requirements simultaneously, as volume performance has a baseline of 3 IOPS / GB, at a minimum of 100 IOPS. In other words, gp2 volume performance scales in proportion to volume size, until the 16,000 limit. As a result, gp2 volumes greater than 1TB are often oversized relative to the amount of data to be stored in order to increase the throughput.
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That’s why you’re probably paying too much for gp2. The extra TBs of storage capacity – and the money spent to enable it – are essentially wasted, as they were only necessary to increase the IOPS limit. Fortunately, there’s a better way: paying for only what you need with gp3.
| Volume Type | gp3 | gp2 |
|---|---|---|
| Short Description | Lowest cost SSD volume that balances price performance for a wide variety of transactional workloads | General Purpose SSD volume that balances price performance for a wide variety of transactional workloads |
| Durability | 99.8% - 99.9% durability | 99.8% - 99.9% durability |
| Use Cases | Virtual desktops, medium sized single instance databases such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle, latency sensitive interactive applications, boot volumes, and dev/test environments | Virtual desktops, medium sized single instance databases such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle, latency sensitive interactive applications, boot volumes, and dev/test environments |
| Volume Size | 1 GB - 16 TB | 1 GB - 16 TB |
| Max IOPS/Volume | 16,000 | 16,000 |
| Max Throughput/Volume | 1,000 MB/s | 250 MB/s |
| Max IOPS/Instance | 260,000 | 260,000 |
| Max Throughput/Instance | 10,000 MB/s | 7,500 MB/s |
| Price | $0.08/GB-month 3,000 IOPS free and $0.005/provisioned IOPS-month over 3,000; 125 MB/s free and $0.04/provisioned MB/s-month over 125 | $0.10/GB-month |
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