title: AWS RDS Provisioned IOPS really worth it?
body: <p>As I understand it, RDS Provisioned IOPS is quite expensive compared to standard I/O rate.</p>
  <p>In Tokyo region, P-IOPS rate is 0.15$/GB, 0.12$/IOP for standard deployment. (<a href="http://aws.amazon.com/rds/pricing/" rel="noreferrer">Double the price for Multi-AZ deployment...</a>)</p>
  <p>For P-IOPS, the minimum required storage is 100GB, IOP is 1000.
  Therefore, starting cost for P-IOPS is 135$ excluding instance pricing.</p>
  <p>For my case, using P-IOPS costs about 100X more than using standard I/O rate.</p>
  <p>This may be a very subjective question, but please give some opinion.</p>
  <p>In the most optimized database for RDS P-IOPS, would the performance be worth the price?</p>
  <p>or</p>
  <p>The <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/rds/#PIOPS" rel="noreferrer">AWS site</a> gives some insights on how P-IOPS can benefit the performance. Is there any actual benchmark?</p>
  <h1>SELF ANSWER</h1>
  <p>In addition to the answer that zeroSkillz wrote, I did some more research. However, please note that I am not an expert on reading database benchmarks. Also, the benchmark and the answer was based on EBS.</p>
  <p>According to <a href="http://iomelt.com/iomelt-aws-ebs-benchmark-december-2012/" rel="noreferrer">an article</a> written by &quot;Rodrigo Campos&quot;, the performance does actually improve significantly.</p>
  <p>From 1000 IOPS to 2000 IOPS, the read/write(including random read/write) performance doubles. From what zeroSkillz said, the standard EBS block provices about 100 IOPS. Imagine the improvement on performance when 100 IOPS goes up to 1000 IOPS(which is the minimum IOPS for P-IOPS deployment).</p>
  <h3>Conclusion</h3>
  <p>According to the benchmark, the performance/price seems reasonable. For performance critical situations, I guess some people or companies should choose P-IOPS even when they are charged 100X more.</p>
  <p>However, if I were a financial consultant in a small or medium business, I would just scale-up(as in CPU, memory) on my RDS instances gradually until the performance/price matches P-IOPS.</p>