I am going to be rebuilding our EC2-hosted PostgreSQL cluster soon, and will try out the provisioned IOPS feature (both with and without RAID) - happy to post benchmarks once I have some useful data.
As in no, you didn't consistently get within 10% of the IOPS you provisioned at their promised 99.9%? Or were there other problems?
I'd be pretty surprised if they were going live with this without being able to deliver, especially since this is likely to be very popular with people using EBS for databases under fairly consistent loads. It's one thing for I/O to suck when they're not actually promising anything, but it's quite another when you're very specifically paying for a performance guarantee...
There's not really any mention of latency or what amount of concurrency is needed to hit the guaranteed level of IOPS. Is it an SSD with very low latency or just ten slow big hard disks striped together?
Color me skeptical, I predict those who pay for more IOPs will howl even louder. I think by now EC2 users have learned that EBS doesn't act like a typical disk drive so treat it like one.
This still doesn't compare well to alternatives, pending benchmarks with an actual application if I directly compare it to most other IOPS benchmarks.
So...no? I mean, I don't have to complain about EBS, it's really simple, I just don't use Amazon's stack therefore I have nothing to complain about.
Now if I was somehow stuck on their stack...like from building my product against their proprietary infrastructure...then I'd be stuck on my ass and complaining for an overpriced and underperforming service.
Their recommended solution is to use their proprietary KV store.
Looks interesting, looking forward to trying it put to see how it performs.