[nierman]

For the best performance you'd want dedicated hardware with a battery-backed RAID array. SSDs can be used for tablespaces with the most frequently accessed data.

Note that the AWS IOPS numbers are for 16KB reads; with a max 4k IOPS disk you'll be getting a max throughput of ~62.5MB. You could toss a few together with software RAID 0 to scale up, but you're limited to a 4x improvement based on the largest instance types listed below:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSOptimi...