Upgrade EBS General Purpose (GP) Storage Type from gp2 to gp3
Summary
Upgrading Amazon EBS volumes from gp2 to gp3 is one of the quickest and safest ways to reduce AWS storage costs.
The gp3 volume type offers ~20% lower price per GB, predictable baseline performance, and the ability to provision IOPS and throughput independently of volume size.
Most workloads can migrate with no downtime, and the change can be completed directly in the AWS Console or via Cli.
This guide explains what GP storage is, why upgrading is beneficial, and how users can perform the upgrade safely.
Implementation Complexity
Low
What is General Purpose (GP) Storage?
General Purpose (GP) storage is the default SSD-based storage class for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). It is designed for a wide range of workloads such as application servers, development environments, boot volumes, and medium-sized databases.
AWS provides two GP variants:
gp2 - Legacy general-purpose SSD - Performance scales with volume size (3 IOPS per GB) - Smaller volumes may experience burst-credit limits
gp3 - Next-generation general-purpose SSD - 20% cheaper per GB than gp2 - Baseline performance included: 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/s throughput - IOPS and throughput can be increased independently of volume size - More predictable performance than gp2
Why Upgrade from gp2 to gp3?
Cost Savings - gp3 costs approximately 20% less per GB than gp2 - Large fleets of volumes can achieve meaningful monthly savings immediately
Improved sustainability - Less underlying SSD capacity needed for equivalent performance - More efficient use of AWS infrastructure - Lower embodied carbon associated with hardware - Lower storage = reduced energy consumption and reduced storage hardware demand - More energy efficient - Shorter workload runtime and idle time
Better Performance Model
gp3 provides fixed baseline performance, regardless of size: - 3,000 IOPS - 125 MB/s throughput - This removes the gp2 limitation where performance is tied to volume size.
Performance Flexibility - Users can add IOPS or throughput only if needed - Avoids the need to over-provision storage for performance
No Downtime Migration - Upgrading from gp2 to gp3 is an in-place modification - Your EC2 instance continues running without interruption - Most upgrades complete within minutes
Future-Proofing - gp3 is the AWS-recommended general-purpose volume type - gp2 is considered a legacy option and may not receive improvements
How to Upgrade Storage Type?
AWS guiance for Modifying an EBS Volume
Reference
- MoJ’s Cloud Platform uses gp3 Storage by default
- AWS EBS Volume Types Overview
- AWS EBS gp3 Performance and Pricing