Amazon EBS announces Provisioned Rate for Volume Initialization
Today, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), a high-performance block storage service, announces the general availability of Provisioned Rate for Volume Initialization. This feature helps you create fully performant Amazon EBS volumes from Amazon EBS Snapshots with predictability, helping speed up Amazon EC2 Instance launches at scale, disaster recovery, and volume copy workflows.
You can use Amazon EBS volumes as durable, block-level storage devices attached to Amazon EC2 instances. With Provisioned Rate for Volume Initialization, you can launch hundreds of instances from Amazon EBS-backed Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) at the same time and know that the attached volumes will be fully performant within a predictable amount of time. This minimizes the amount of time before workloads can fully utilize the underlying storage. The feature is also useful for disaster recovery scenarios when using an existing Amazon EBS Snapshot and needing the Amazon EBS volume to be created and initialized as fast as possible. In addition, you can use this feature to quickly create and initialize copies of volumes (using snapshots) in a different Availability Zone or account.
You use the feature by specifying a volume initialization rate when creating new volumes from snapshots, launching new instances from Amazon EBS-backed AMIs, and replacing root volumes of instances, provisioning volumes using the Amazon EBS Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver. You can also specify the rate in Launch Templates to ensure all instances launched using the template will use the rate when initializing volumes. Each account will have a limit on the maximum concurrent volume initialization rate that can be used when initialization volumes. This limit can be increased for each account/region by using Service Quotas.
This feature is now available in both Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. Customers can use the feature through the Amazon Web Services Management Console, Amazon Command Line Interface (CLI), Amazon SDKs, and Amazon CloudFormation. For pricing information, please visit the EBS pricing page. To learn more, refer to the technical documentation.