Billing for AWS Provisioned IOPS (io1)

2 May 2018
Watch out before it's too late
aws

This will be applicable for services with the rate that looks like this:

$X per provisioned IOPS-month

For example, it could be RDS (Relational Database SErvice), or EBS (Elastic Block Store).

rate

The rate shown above is the rate for RDS of instance type Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) Volumes.

If you have created the instance (or could be created by another service), but not sure what that means to your bill. Chances are you might not need it, or otherwise, be prepared for a higher bill amount.

How the bill are calculated for provisioned IOPS-month type of instance:

$0.11 * 1000 IOPS * number of hours

= $110 for 1 month

= $3.67 for 1 day

That's for 1000 IOPS for an instance.


Also, please take note that:

  1. Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) volumes are not included in the AWS Free Tier
  2. They are not charged by usage of I/O, but the amount of IOPS enabled/provisioned.

So if you enable an instance of 8000 IOPS of io1, but only used a bit of it, you will still be charged for

$0.11 * 8000 * number of hours


Plus, there will be a charge for the storage rate. Refer to the image attached above.

$0.138 per GB-month


So, if you are not sure, probably a General Purpose SSD (gp2) volume is your right choice.

Refer to the EBS pricing for another example. (the IOPS-month rate is applicable for RDS as well)