How to increase IOPS with EBS

In gaming servers, the IOPS requirement is relatively high and a single AWS EBS can’t meet its requirement.

There are many types of EBS (Provisioned IOPS) and most cases will be satisfied with having Provisioned IOPS as Max IOPS/volume is 64,000 and 256,000.

Then, how could we support high IOPS requirements? There is a trick. Before talking about the solution you should understand:

• RAID 0 (striping) array allows you to get a higher level of performance for a file system
• You can attach multiple EBS to a single EC2 instance

How to configure RAID 0 Configuration on EBS Volumes: https://cloudacademy.com/blog/amazon-aws-raid-0-configuration-on-ebs-volumes/

Maybe you still need to consider which type of EBS volume you are going to use. If you are aiming at 1,000,000 IOPS, then you can’t make it with gp3, gp2 as there is a limitation on the number of EBS to be attached on a single instance. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/volume_limits.html

There were only general SSD supporting multi-attach but now you can attach multiple Provisioned IOPS volumes to EC2 within the same Availability Zone. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/02/ebs-multi-attach-available-provisioned-iops-ssd-volumes

For instance, the requirement is a need for 100K IOPS of write performance on EBS volumes, you can create a RAID 0 configuration for five (5 x 20,000) IOPS EBS volumes

Reference for the article

• https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/02/ebs-multi-attach-available-provisioned-iops-ssd-volumes/
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/volume_limits.html
• https://levelup.gitconnected.com/aws-tricks-raid0-with-ebs-volumes-aff5ccac88bf
• https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/features/
• https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/optimize-ebs-provisioned-iops/
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/raid-config.html