During last year’s AWS re:Invent conference, AWS announced their plan to support larger EBS volumes - at the time the maximum EBS volume size was 1TB. If a user needed to create volumes and file systems larger than 1TB, they had to rely on drive aggregation techniques like software RAID or drive concatenation. This increased complexity, costs and risk.

Today, AWS announced the availability of the promised larger and faster EBS volumes. Now you can create:

• Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes that store up to 16 TB (terabytes) and process up to 20,000 IOPS, with a maximum throughput of 320 MBps (megabytes per second). Introduced in 2012, these are designed for I/O-intensive workloads that require consistent performance, such as relational and NoSQL databases. This volume type allows you to provision the exact level of consistent performance that you need and pay for only what you provision.
• General Purpose (SSD) volumes that store up to 16 TB and process up to 10,000 IOPS with a maximum throughput of 160 MBps. Launched last June, these are the default EBS volume type for Amazon EC2 instances and are suitable for a broad range of bursty workloads, including small- to medium-sized databases (either NoSQL or relational), dev and test environments, and boot volumes.

As you can see in the following diagram, the new larger EBS volumes provide a method to surpass  the previously mentioned capacity and performance limits, with reduced overall complexity.:

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Amazon finally released EBS volumes that are larger than 1TB, a feature many have been waiting for, for years. Read the announcement for more details, but the quick summary is, that you can now provision SSD (gp2 and io1) EBS Volumes up to 16TB in size, with up to 20,000 Provisioned IOPS: