In this blog, we’ll use some test results to look at the rationale for using provisioned IOPS volumes for AWS databases.

One piece of advice you often hear running MySQL, MongoDB or other databases in the AWS EC2 environment is that you should use volumes with provisioned IOPs. This kind of makes sense on the “marketing” level, where provisioned IOPS (io1) volumes are designed for IO-intensive database workloads, while General Purpose (gp2) volumes are not. But if you go to the AWS volume type description, you will find that gp2s are shown to have pretty good IO performance. So where do all these supposed database performance problems for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), with no provisioned IOs, come from?

Here is what I found out running experiments with a beta of …

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