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Storage Optimized (D2)

  • What it is
    • High, sequential read/write access to very large datasets on locally attached disk.
    • Measured in tens of thousands of low-latency random IOPS.
  • Use cases
    • Data warehousing, distributed file systems, Hadoop/MapReduce clusters.
    • High-frequency OLTP systems, NoSQL databases with heavy local I/O.
  • Key nuance: instance store, not EBS
    • Storage is physically attached to the host — it is ephemeral.
    • Stop or terminate the instance and the data is gone.
    • Use Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) when the volume must survive the instance.
  • Family letters
    • D — dense HDD storage (cheap capacity).
    • I — NVMe SSD (high IOPS).
    • H — HDD balance of compute and storage.

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