Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added a solid state disk (SSD) volume type option to Amazon (AMZN) Elastic Block Store (EBS) with the intention of offering customers a high-performance storage service at a low cost. The new General Purpose SSD volumes were designed for five-nines availability and are intended to provide customers with predictable performance for a variety of workloads, including personal productivity, small-to-medium databases, test and development environments and boot volumes.

The new volumes have the ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) per volume, independent of volume size. The idea is to meet the performance and bursting requirements of applications while delivering a consistent baseline of three IOPS per Gigabyte. Pricing for the service starts at 10 cents/GB.

"Customers have been using Amazon EBS since 2008 to run their most demanding applications and databases on AWS. We continue to iterate on the service to support the evolving needs of our customers," said Peter De Santis, vice president of Compute at Amazon Web Services, in a prepared statement. "In 2012, we introduced Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes, providing customers with access to SSD technology for their most demanding workloads. With the introduction of EBS General Purpose (SSD) volumes today, SSD technology now can be applied to a much broader range of use cases at a lower cost while also delivering high IOPS, low latency and high bandwidth."

With the launch of General Purpose (SSD) volumes, customers can now choose between three Amazon EBS volumes—General Purpose (SSD), Provisioned IOPS (SSD) and Magnetic volumes.

According to AWS: "The General Purpose (SSD) volumes introduced today are designed to support the vast majority of persistent storage workloads and are the new default Amazon EBS volume. Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes are designed for I/O-intensive applications such as large relational or NoSQL databases where performance consistency and low latency are critical. With Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes, customers choose the amount of IOPS they require, up to 48,000 IOPS per Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, and they only have to provision and pay for the storage they need. Magnetic volumes, formerly known as Standard volumes, provide the lowest cost per gigabyte of all Amazon EBS volume types and are ideal for workloads where data is accessed less often and the absolute lowest storage cost is paramount."

The new General Purpose (SSD) volumes can be launched using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface and AWS SDKs.