Amazon Web Services (AWS) has just announced a powerful enhancement for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS): Provisioned Rate for Volume Initialization is now generally available.

This new feature allows you to create fully performant EBS volumes from snapshots with predictable initialization speeds, helping you launch EC2 instances faster at scale. It’s a game-changer for high-performance, time-sensitive workloads.

🧠 The Problem (Before This Feature)

When launching EC2 instances from EBS snapshots (like AMIs), volumes are lazy-loaded from Amazon S3. That means data is only fetched when accessed for the first time.

This causes:

• Slower disk I/O initially
• Inconsistent application performance
• Delays in workload readiness

This has long been a pain point, especially for workloads that require high disk performance immediately after launch.

✅ The Solution: Provisioned Rate for Volume Initialization

With this new feature, you can now specify a volume initialization rate in MB/s when:

• Creating volumes from snapshots
• Launching EC2 instances from snapshot-based AMIs
• Replacing root volumes
• Using EBS through the Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver
• Defining Launch Templates

EBS will proactively preload the data from the snapshot at the rate you define, giving your applications consistent, high performance from the moment they launch.

🔹 Real-World Example

Let’s say you’re launching 100 EC2 instances from a snapshot-based AMI to deploy a scalable web application.

Before:

• The instances boot quickly.
• However, volumes are slow because blocks are lazy-loaded.
• Performance is inconsistent and slow for the first few minutes .

Now (With Provisioned Rate):

• You define an initialization rate of 300 MB/s.
• The volumes are proactively initialized at this rate.
• Every instance has fully performant EBS volumes quickly and predictably.

This is especially useful for launching fleets of instances in auto scaling groups, disaster recovery, or batch processing systems.

🛠️ Using It (Simplified CLI Example)

You can specify the provisioned initialization rate in the AWS CLI like this:

aws ec2 create-volume \
  --availability-zone us-east-1a \
  --snapshot-id snap-0123456789abcdef0 \
  --volume-type gp3 \
  --provisioned-initialization-rate 300

You can also embed this rate into Launch Templates so that every instance launched with the template gets the same initialization performance.

📊 Quick Comparison

🔚 Final Thoughts

This is a major improvement for teams who:

• Launch EC2 instances frequently from snapshots
• Depend on consistent and fast disk I/O
• Operate large-scale, time-critical environments

It eliminates the guesswork from volume performance after launch and helps ensure that your applications are ready to go — fast.

Have you tried this feature yet? Share your experience or use case in the comments below!