ebs
11 articles on ebs — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
EC2 hibernate vs stop cost: which saves more on idle instances
Stopping an EC2 instance halts compute charges but keeps EBS billing; hibernating preserves memory to disk for fast resume but stores that memory on EBS, adding cost. For part-time workloads, knowing which to use and what still bills is worth real money. Here is the comparison.
EBS io2 Block Express cost: when the fastest volume pays for itself
EBS io2 Block Express delivers up to 256,000 IOPS and 4,000 MB/s per volume at the same price as regular io2. Here is how the tiered IOPS pricing works, what a high-performance database volume actually costs, and when gp3 is the smarter buy.
EBS throughput vs IOPS cost: which one you are actually paying for
On gp3 you provision IOPS and throughput separately, and paying for the wrong one is a common waste. Here is how the two are priced, how to tell which your workload needs, and why a database and a log archive want opposite settings.
EBS gp2 vs gp3: why gp3 is almost always cheaper
gp3 is the newer general-purpose EBS volume type, and for most workloads it costs about 20 percent less than gp2 while delivering baseline performance that gp2 could only reach at large sizes. Here is why, and when to migrate.
EBS io2 vs gp3: paying for guaranteed IOPS
io2 and io2 Block Express are the high-end EBS volume types built for demanding databases, with high durability and very high provisioned IOPS. gp3 covers most needs far more cheaply. Here is when io2's premium is worth it.
EBS snapshot cost creep: the storage bill that never stops growing
EBS snapshots are cheap individually but accumulate silently: automated backups, forgotten manual snapshots, and orphaned volumes pile up until snapshot storage rivals or exceeds your live volume cost. Here is how to find and stop the creep.
EFS vs EBS cost: shared file storage vs attached block storage
EBS is block storage attached to one instance; EFS is a shared file system many instances mount at once. EFS costs more per GB but removes provisioning and scaling overhead. Here is how to choose on cost and fit.
AWS EBS snapshot cost: incremental storage and the archive tier
EBS snapshots bill about $0.05 per GB-month for changed blocks (they are incremental), or about $0.0125 in the Archive tier for rarely-restored snapshots. Snapshot sprawl from unmanaged schedules is the usual culprit. Here is how to control it.
EFS vs EBS vs S3 cost: pick by access pattern, not the per-GB rate
S3 (~$0.023/GB) is cheapest, EBS (~$0.08) middle, EFS (~$0.30) priciest, but they're not interchangeable. Here's how to match the service to the access pattern and avoid paying 13x by using EFS where S3 would do.
EBS gp3 vs io2: when each makes sense
For 95% of production workloads, gp3 is the right choice (cheaper, performant enough). Use io2 only for over 16K IOPS sustained, 99.999% durability, or Multi-Attach. Here's the pricing math and the migration playbook.
When gp2 to gp3 actually saves money (and when it doesn't)
gp3 is 20% cheaper than gp2 with better baseline performance. The migration is in-place with no downtime. Here's exactly when it saves money, when it doesn't, and how to migrate safely at scale.