A team is choosing between gp2 and gp3 General Purpose SSD volumes for a fleet of small (50 GiB) boot volumes and wants to understand how their baseline performance differs. Which statement is correct?
- gp2 volumes provide a fixed 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s baseline no matter how large the volume is
- gp3 and gp2 both scale baseline IOPS proportionally with volume size, with no fixed floor
- gp3 volumes provide a fixed 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s baseline regardless of volume size, while gp2's baseline IOPS scale with volume size (3 IOPS per GiB, subject to a burst ceiling)
- gp2 volumes provide a fixed 16,000 IOPS baseline regardless of size, while gp3 does not support a baseline at all
Why C? And why not the others?
Correct answer: C. gp3 volumes provide a fixed 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s baseline regardless of volume size, while gp2's baseline IOPS scale with volume size (3 IOPS per GiB, subject to a burst ceiling)
gp3 decouples baseline performance from volume size: every gp3 volume gets 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s included at no extra charge regardless of how large it is, and additional IOPS (up to 16,000) and throughput (up to 1,000 MiB/s) can be provisioned independently for extra cost. gp2, by contrast, still ties baseline IOPS to volume size at a rate of 3 IOPS per GiB, with smaller volumes able to burst above that baseline using burst credits up to a ceiling of 3,000 IOPS. The option describing gp2 as offering a fixed 3,000-IOPS/125-MiB/s baseline regardless of size assigns gp3's own signature decoupled-from-size design to the wrong volume type. The option claiming both types scale baseline performance with size ignores gp3's explicit, size-independent baseline entirely. The option describing gp2 as offering a fixed 16,000-IOPS baseline invents a figure that doesn't match gp2's actual size-scaled formula, and gp3 clearly does support a baseline, contradicting the claim that it has none.
Source: AWS EBS documentation: Amazon EBS volume types — General Purpose SSD (gp3 vs gp2) baseline performance