So, I’ve been running some stuff on gp2 volumes for ages, like pretty much everyone else, right? Never really thought much about it. It just worked, mostly. But lately, things felt a bit sluggish sometimes, especially during peak times. Not always, but enough to be annoying.
I was poking around, looking at costs and performance metrics, just standard check-ups. Saw the bill and noticed those gp2 volumes weren’t exactly cheap, especially when you add up a bunch of them. Then I remembered hearing folks talk about gp3. Didn’t pay much attention back then, figured it was just the new shiny thing.
Digging into gp3 a bit
This time, I actually looked it up. Found out gp3 lets you set the performance (IOPS and throughput) separate from the storage size. With gp2, if you wanted more performance, you often had to pay for a bigger disk you didn’t even need. That always felt kinda wasteful to me. Plus, the baseline performance on gp3 looked decent, and the cost per GB was actually lower than gp2. Seemed like a potential win-win: maybe faster, definitely cheaper?
Okay, decision time. I thought, what’s the harm in trying? Worst case, it’s the same or I switch it back, right? I decided to start with a less critical volume first, just to be safe. Didn’t want to break anything important on my first try.
Making the Switch
Actually doing it was surprisingly simple. Here’s basically what I did:
- Logged into the console, the usual routine.
- Went straight to the EC2 section, then found ‘Volumes’.
- Picked the volume I wanted to test with. Selected it.
- Clicked on ‘Actions’, then ‘Modify Volume’.
- There it was, plain as day: ‘Volume Type’. Switched it from gp2 to gp3.
- For this first one, I just left the IOPS and Throughput at their default gp3 settings. Didn’t want to get fancy yet.
- Clicked ‘Modify’ and confirmed.
And… that was pretty much it. The console said it was optimizing in the background, but the volume stayed online the whole time. No downtime needed, which was a big relief. I kept an eye on it for a while, checked the monitoring graphs. Everything looked fine, maybe even a little snappier, though it’s hard to tell for sure without proper benchmarking.
The Result? Pretty Good.
After that first successful test, I got bolder. Over the next few days, I went through and switched most of my other gp2 volumes over to gp3. Just followed the same steps. Click, click, modify. For some volumes where I knew I needed a bit more performance than the gp3 default, I bumped up the IOPS slightly, but still kept it way lower than what I would have needed with a larger gp2 volume.
The best part? Checking the bill prediction later. It definitely looked lower. Getting the same or potentially better performance for less money? Yeah, I’ll take that. It wasn’t some magic bullet that solved all problems, but it was a solid, easy improvement. Definitely worth the small effort it took to click through the modification process.
