Amazon today announced the release of Provisioned IOPS for EBS volumes. Having ran services in Amazon EC2 before I have not been a fan of EBS volumes do to their inconsistent and spotty performance. I have talked to folks who have had to launch multiple instances and EBS volumes to get one that met their performance requirements. While this isn’t common it is more apparent during the busy holiday season when retailers are leveraging EC2 capacity for holiday shopping. With a guaranteed IOPS level for each EBS volume you can now add IO Intensive workloads to EC2 without fear of being bogged down in EBS hell. I haven’t had a chance to test this feature yet, but plan to within the next week or so. Only time will tell if Amazon can meet their IOPS commitments but this is much better than the previous EBS solutions.
Pricing (East Region):
Amazon EBS Standard volumes
- $0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage
- $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests
Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes
- $0.125 per GB-month of provisioned storage
- $0.10 per provisioned IOPS-month
Amazon EBS Snapshots to Amazon S3
- $0.125 per GB-month of data stored
A 10gb volume with 1000 iops per day would cost you $3001.25 per month. You should definitely figure out your IO needs with IOSTAT, and remember your caching mechanisms will have an impact on IO to disk.