About Elastic Block Storage (EBS)
Effective August 1, 2017
The following information and functionality is effective as of August 1, 2017. Please reach out to us at [email protected] with questions and concerns.
Overview
Use the Task page to customize the amount of Elastic Block Storage (EBS) disk space attached to different Amazon instance configurations to optimize your computation with fine-grained control over instance requirements and costs.
Pricing
The EBS customization functionality is accompanied by changes in the way that your organization is billed for EBS and Amazon Web Services (AWS) costs on the CGC. Please note that prices are not increasing for non-EBS instances that have ephemeral, non-customizable disk space attached.
When AWS introduced EBS, Amazon changed its pricing structure to charge separately for the compute and storage used. Currently, AWS charges ~$0.10 per GB*h/month for EBS disk space. Previously, the CGC covered AWS customer costs for EBS usage. However, with the introduction of the customization functionality, the CGC will pass through EBS costs. Our policy is to to be completely transparent around your AWS charges and to not charge a premium to access AWS services through the CGC. As such, an additional charge on the Task page and your invoice reflects your usage of EBS disk space. Learn more about viewing EBS usage costs.
Learn how to check if your tools or workflows attach EBS disk space to instances.
Also note that key public tools on the CGC are set by default to use EBS instances, such as:
- Whole Exome Sequencing
- RSEM 1.2.31 Workflow With Star Aligner
- RNA-seq Alignment - TopHat
- BWA MEM Bundle
- STAR Genome Generate
- Cufflinks
- Picard SamToFastq
- FastQC Analysis
Learn more about viewing EBS usage costs.
Cost examples
The table below displays cost examples that demonstrate that EBS-related costs will vary according to the size of the EBS storage attached.
| Instance type | EBS (in GB) | ~ EBS cost (per Hour) | Instance-only cost (per Hour) | Cost including EBS volume (per hour) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| c4.2xlarge | 1000 | $0.14 | $0.40 | $0.54 |
| c4.8xlarge | 700 | $0.10 | $1.59 | $1.69 |
| c4.large | 700 | $0.10 | $0.10 | $0.20 |
| c4.4xlarge | 700 | $0.10 | $0.80 | $0.90 |
| r3.8xlarge | 2000 | $0.28 | $2.66 | $2.94 |
| r3.4xlarge | 1000 | $0.14 | $1.33 | $1.47 |
| c4.8xlarge | 1400 | $0.19 | $1.59 | $1.78 |
| c4.xlarge | 700 | $0.10 | $0.20 | $0.30 |
| r3.8xlarge | 1400 | $0.19 | $2.66 | $2.85 |
| m4.10xlarge | 1400 | $0.19 | $2.00 | $2.19 |
| m4.xlarge | 1000 | $0.14 | $0.20 | $0.34 |
Example: Run WES BWA + GATK 2.3.9 workflow on a c4.2xlarge with 1TB of EBS
Consider the following example for additional insight into how EBS pricing will change at the workflow level:
- c4.2xlarge = 8 CPUs, 15GB RAM (EBS Only) is $0.40 per Hour
- (Optional) attach 1TB of EBS disk space ~$0.14 per Hour
For a sample with 73x coverage, the workflow took 3 hours to complete:
- c4.2xlarge x 3h = $1.20
- 1TB EBS x 3h = $0.10 per GB-month 1024 GB 3 hours / (24 hours/day * 30 day-month) = $0.43
Previously, your charge for the EBS instance would have been $1.20. However, with the $0.43 of EBS charges now included, your costs are $1.63
Advantage of EBS Customization
Despite the additional charge for EBS, total costs are roughly the same as older generation non-EBS instances which conversely do not offer the ability to customize disk space size.
Take into account the following example from our work on the Pan Cancer Analyses of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) project, which had a large CPU and RAM requirement. For this project, we started with a cc2.8xlarge instance with 32 CPUs, 60.5 GB RAM and 3TB non-EBS, ephemeral storage, which costs $2.00 per hour. Once we learned that 3TB of disk space was much larger than required, we decided to use a newer generation c4.8xlarge instance with 36 CPU and 60 GB RAM ($1.59 per hour) with 1.5TB EBS ($0.20 per hour), which saved about 10% in costs.
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