Amazon provides many different types of EC2 instances and EBS block storage. Out of this large list, Dell has qualified certain EC2 and EBS types that are the most appropriate for running the underlying OneFS file system.
Cloud architectures require a balance between cost and performance. Larger EC2 instances provide more performance but at an increased cost. Hard disk drive based EBS volumes have performance tied to the capacity (and cost) while solid state drive EBS volumes have configurable performance.
The trick is to deploy a cluster that has performance appropriate for the use case and not to bottleneck any individual component. For example, if provisioning highly performant solid-state EBS volumes, the EC2 instance needs to have enough performance to accommodate the storage throughput provided by those solid-state volumes. Similarly, if deploying more modestly performing hard disk drive based EBS volumes, it is not necessary to deploy such a powerful EC2 instance to host them.
For more details, see the following resources:
