Performance of instance store vs EBS-optimized EC2 or RAID volumes

Question

As far as I can tell from my own experience and from what I have read, there are very few situations in which one wouldn't want to use EBS over instance store. However, instance store is generally faster for disk read/writes due to it's being physically attached to the EC2. How much faster, and whether it is faster in all cases, I don't know.

So, what I am curious about, if anyone out there has had some experience with any of these, is the relative speed/performance of:

1. An EC2 using instance store vs a non-storage-optimized EC2 using EBS (of any storage type)

2. An EC2 using instance store vs a storage-optimized (I3) EC2 using EBS

3. An EC2 using instance store vs a non-storage-optimized EC2 using some kind of EBS RAIDing

4. A non-storage-optimized EBS-backed EC2 vs a storage-optimized EC2 vs an EC2 with an EBS RAID configuration

5. All of the above vs EBS-optimized instances of any type.

The more specific and quantifiable the answers the better -- thanks!

Answer 1

Now Available – I3 Instances for Demanding, I/O Intensive Applications claims that Instance Store on i3 instances:

can deliver up to 3.3 million IOPS at a 4 KB block and up to 16 GB/second of sequential disk throughput.

Coming Soon – The I2 Instance Type – High I/O Performance Via SSD claims that Instance Store on i2 instances:

deliver 350,000 random read IOPS and 320,000 random write IOPS.

Amazon EBS Volume Types lists:

• General Purpose SSD: Maximum 10,000 IOPS/Volume
• Provisioned IOPS SSD: Maximum 20,000 IOPS/Volume
• Throughput Optimized HDD: Maximum throughput 500 MiB/s (Optimized for throughput rather than IOPS, good for large, contiguous reads)