Amazon EBS - How AWS Pricing Works
How Amazon EBS is priced

Amazon EBS

Amazon EBS is an easy-to-use, high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes are off-instance storage that persists independently from the life of an instance. They are analogous to virtual disks in the cloud. Amazon EBS provides two volume types:

  • Solid-state drive (SSD)-backed volumes are optimized for transactional workloads involving frequent read/write operations with small I/O size where the dominant performance attribute is IOPS.

  • Hard disk drive (HDD)-backed volumes are optimized for large streaming workloads where throughput (measured in megabits per second) is a better performance measure than IOPS.

How Amazon EBS is priced

Amazon EBS pricing includes three factors:

  • Volumes: Volume storage for all Amazon EBS volume types is charged by the amount of GB you provision per month, until you release the storage.

  • Snapshots: Snapshot storage is based on the amount of space your data consumes in Amazon S3. Because Amazon EBS does not save empty blocks, it is likely that the snapshot size will be considerably less than your volume size. Copying Amazon EBS snapshots is charged based on the volume of data transferred across Regions. For the first snapshot of a volume, Amazon EBS saves a full copy of your data to Amazon S3. For each incremental snapshot, only the changed part of your Amazon EBS volume is saved. After the snapshot is copied, standard Amazon EBS snapshot charges apply for storage in the destination Region.

  • Amazon EBS Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR): This is charged in Date Services Unit-Hours (DSUs) for each Availability Zone in which it is enabled. DSUs are billed per minute with a one-hour minimum. The price of one FSR DSU-hour is $0.75 per Availability Zone (pricing based on us-east-1 (N.Virginia).

  • Amazon EBS direct APIs for Snapshots: Amazon EBS direct APIs for Snapshots provide access to directly read Amazon EBS snapshot data and identify differences between two snapshots. The following charges apply for these APIs:

    • ListChangedBlocks and ListSnapshotBlocks APIs are charged per request.

    • GetSnapshotBlock and PutSnapshotBlock APIs are charged per SnapshotAPIUnit (block size 512 KiB).

  • Data transfer: Consider the amount of data transferred out of your application. Inbound data transfer is free and outbound data transfer charges are tiered. If you use external or cross-region data transfers, additional EC2 data transfer charges will apply.

For more information, see the Amazon EBS pricing page.