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Difficulty: EasyOptimizing Compute and Storage Performance

An application hosted on Amazon EC2 instances uses General Purpose SSD (gp2) EBS volumes. During a daily batch reporting process, write operations experience significant latency. CloudWatch metrics indicate that the volumes are consistently hitting their baseline IOPS limit and exhausting their burst balance. Which of the following is the most cost-effective action to resolve the storage performance bottleneck with the least administrative effort?

  1. A
    Request a pre-warming of the Application Load Balancer (ALB) from AWS Support before the daily batch process begins to distribute the incoming request spikes.
  2. B
    Enable Amazon RDS Multi-AZ replication for the database storage layer to automatically scale the write transactions across standby instances.
  3. Modify the EBS volumes from gp2 to gp3 and provision the required IOPS and throughput independently of the volume size.Answer
  4. D
    Purchase EC2 Instance Savings Plans to offset the high costs of upgrading the baseline storage performance of the EC2 instance volumes.

Answer

Modify the EBS volumes from gp2 to gp3 and provision the required IOPS and throughput independently of the volume size.
Transitioning EBS volumes from gp2 to gp3 is the most cost-effective and low-effort way to solve this bottleneck. In gp2, baseline IOPS are tied to the volume size (3 IOPS per GB3 \text{ IOPS per GB} up to a maximum of 16,000 IOPS16,000 \text{ IOPS}), whereas gp3 volumes offer a constant baseline of 3,000 IOPS3,000 \text{ IOPS} and 125 MB/s125 \text{ MB/s} throughput for free and allow scaling performance parameters independently without increasing the underlying storage volume size.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the metrics and identify the storage bottleneck.
The application's gp2 volumes are hitting their baseline IOPS limit and depleting their burst credit pool.
gp2 volume performance scales linearly with capacity (3 IOPS per GB3 \text{ IOPS per GB}), meaning small volumes have low baseline IOPS and rely on burst credits.
2
Evaluate the storage optimization alternatives.
gp3 volumes allow upgrading baseline IOPS and throughput without increasing the volume size, unlike gp2 which requires increasing volume size to get higher baseline IOPS.
This provides a highly cost-effective and low-effort way to tune performance directly on the volume.

Key Concept

EBS storage performance optimization by transitioning from gp2 to gp3 to provision performance parameters independently of size.
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Topics

Optimizing Compute and Storage Performance