Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes are a critical component of AWS infrastructure, providing persistent block storage for EC2 instances. However, many organizations overprovision IOPS and throughput for their EBS volumes, leading to unnecessary costs. This CloudFix Finder/Fixer helps you optimize your EBS volume performance settings to match your actual workload requirements while maintaining performance.

Contents

What Does This Finder/Fixer Do?

This tool analyzes your EBS volumes’ actual IOPS and throughput utilization patterns and identifies opportunities to optimize these settings without impacting performance. It specifically looks for:

  • Volumes with provisioned IOPS significantly higher than their actual usage
  • Volumes with provisioned throughput exceeding their workload requirements
  • Opportunities to adjust these settings while maintaining performance headroom

AWS Services Affected

Amazon EBS
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Benefits

  • Reduce costs by eliminating overprovisioned IOPS and throughput
  • Maintain optimal performance by right-sizing based on actual usage patterns
  • Automated analysis and recommendations for volume optimization
  • No impact on production workloads during optimization

How It Works

  1. CloudFix analyzes CloudWatch metrics for your EBS volumes
  2. It identifies volumes where provisioned IOPS or throughput significantly exceeds actual usage
  3. The tool calculates optimal settings based on historical utilization patterns
  4. You can review and approve the recommended changes
  5. CloudFix safely applies the optimizations with no downtime

Common Questions

Q: Will optimizing these settings impact my application performance?

No. CloudFix recommends changes only when there is clear evidence of overprovisioning, and maintains appropriate headroom above peak utilization to ensure performance is not impacted.

Q: How much can I save with this optimization?

Savings vary based on your current provisioning levels and actual usage patterns. Many organizations can reduce their EBS costs by 20-30% through IOPS and throughput optimization.

Q: Is there any downtime during optimization?

No. Changes to provisioned IOPS and throughput can be made without any volume downtime or impact to attached instances.