Part 3: Understanding Amazon Elastic Block Store - EBS PIOPS Volumes

Provisioned IOPS Volumes

Provisioned IOPS Volumes is the latest type of EBS volumes introduced by AWS. They are also multi- tenant with Availability zone scope, but the major difference is that they offer consistent IO performance.  It is particularly designed for IO intensive applications with random Read/Write pattern requiring up to 10,000 IOPS or more with consistency.  Example OLTP relational database workloads are best candidates for PIOPS Volumes. They follow random r/w IO pattern and require consistent IOPS. Depending upon the size of the volume you can chose the IOPS you require for that volume and Provisioned IOPS volume will guarantee that throughput to you. Since the IOPS is provisioned and dedicated you can expect a consistent IO throughput when you use these volumes. The least size of a provisioned IOPS volume is 10 GB and maximum throughput currently you can extract from a 1 TB EBS Volume is 4000 IOPS (Refer AWS site for the latest value). The ratio of IOPS provisioned to the volume size requested can be a maximum of 10:1. For example, a volume with 1000 IOPS must be at least 100 GB. As best practice it is always recommended to combine Provisioned IOPS volumes with EBS optimized instances when you are architecting a performance sensitive production database. Usually high performance databases have minimal variability in workloads and require dedicated EC2->EBS traffic with High IOPS performance. The EBS optimized+ Provisioned IOPS proves to be an ideal combination for these needs. 



EBS Article Series (continued..)

Part 1: Understanding Amazon Elastic Block Store
Part 2: Understanding Standard EBS Volumes
Part 3: Understanding EBS PIOPS Volumes
Part 4: Understanding EBS-Optimized Instances
Part 5: Understanding Latency in EBS
Part 7: 10% of your provisioned IOPS 99.9% of the time
Part 8: Performance Tuning - Pre Warming the EBS volume
Part 9: Performance Tuning - EBS Striping
Part 10: Performance Tuning - IO Block Size
Part 11: Understanding Amazon EBS Snapshots
Part 12: Securing Amazon EBS volumes - EBS Encryption using SecureCloud 
Part 13: Amazon EBS Security Best practices and tips