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Outdated Provisioned IOPS Volume Type for High-I/O Workloads

The short version

Many environments continue using io1 volumes for high-performance workloads due to legacy provisioning or lack of awareness of io2 benefits. io2 volumes provide equivalent or better performance and durability with reduced cost at scale.

Adam Richter

Senior Optimization Solutions Architect @ Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS service
AWS EBS
Category
Storage
Reference
CER-0162
Type
Outdated Version

Explanation

Why the waste happens and who it affects.

Failing to adopt io2 where appropriate results in unnecessary spend on IOPS-heavy volumes.

Billing model

The pricing dimensions that drive this cost.

Provisioned IOPS volumes are billed based on the amount of storage (per GB) and the number of provisioned IOPS. While io1 and io2 share the same baseline pricing, io2 introduces tiered IOPS pricing-offering a lower per-IOPS rate once volumes exceed thresholds such as 32,000 IOPS. For high-throughput workloads, this tiering makes io2 significantly more cost-effective.

How to detect

5 checks to find it in your estate.

  • Review provisioned EBS volumes with the io1 volume type
  • Identify volumes provisioned with more than 32,000 IOPS
  • Confirm the workload requires sustained high IOPS
  • Estimate cost differences between io1 and io2 for similar configurations
  • Check for infrastructure-as-code templates still defaulting to io1

How to fix

4 ways to remove the waste.

  • Convert high-IOPS io1 volumes to io2 where supported
  • Update provisioning templates to default to io2 for performance-critical workloads
  • Validate application compatibility (typically no changes required)
  • Monitor cost and performance post-migration to confirm impact

Documentation

Vendor references for pricing and configuration.

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