AWS announces tiered pricing for input/output operations per second (IOPS) charges for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) io2 volume, reducing the cost of provisioning peak IOPS by 15%

Posted on: Dec 1, 2020

Today, we are launching a tiered pricing structure for provisioned IOPS charges on io2 volumes. With this tiered pricing, we are reducing the price of provisioning peak IOPS (64,000 IOPS) on io2 volume by 15%, or an estimated $608 per month.  

Customers choose io2 volumes, the latest generation of provisioned IOPS volumes, to run their critical, performance-intensive applications like SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgresSQL, and Oracle databases.
Customers provision and pay for storage and performance independently of each other on io2, enabling them to right size the volume for their application. Previously, all the provisioned IOPS on a volume were charged at a single rate. Therefore, in a region that charges $0.065 per provisioned IOPS-month, a customer who provisioned a volume for the entire month with peak performance of 64,000 IOPS would have paid $4,160 per month for IOPS. Now, with the new tiered pricing structure, the first 32,000 IOPS provisioned on a volume are charged at the current base rate ($0.065 per provisioned IOPS-mo) and the second tier between 32,001 and 64,000 is charged at a 30% lower rate ($0.046 per provisioned IOPS-mo). As a result, provisioning 64,000 IOPS on a volume for the entire month now costs $3,552 in IOPS charges, a 15% cost saving for customers. This makes it more economical to scale performance on a single volume. 

Furthermore, for customers who have even higher performance requirement than currently supported by a single io2 volume today, we are previewing io2 volumes that run on EBS Block Express, the next generation of our block storage architecture. io2 Block Express volumes can be provisioned to deliver peak IOPS of 256,000. For these volume, any IOPS provisioned over 64,000 IOPS will be charged at a further 30% lower rate than the second tier ($0.032 per provisioned IOP-mo for IOPS over 64,000). This lowers the effective rate to $0.038 per provisioned IOPS on a volume provisioned with 256,000 IOPS. You can request access to io2 Block Express volume here.

Amazon EBS io2 customers who have volumes with greater than 32,000 provisioned IOPS automatically benefit from this new lower price, which is effective starting December 1st, 2020. Note that the tiered IOPS pricing is applied at an individual volume level and not cumulatively on the total IOPS that you have provisioned across multiple io2 volumes. New pricing applies to all AWS Regions where io2 is available. To learn more, see the Amazon EBS pricing page.