RDS Provisioned IOPS: A Cost Analysis for High Performance Cloud Database

Experiment results: AWS Provisioned IOPS costs are 
around 46% of the total cost for our example deployment

Today AWS announced support for Provisioned IOPS (I/O operations per second) Storage for Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service). This enables enterprises to put I/O critical and intensive applications on Amazon's RDS and be sure that high performance will be delivered. PlanForCloud announced its support for provisioned IOPS immediately after the AWS announcement, you can now run your deployments through a 3-year simulation to see how much provisioned IOPS would cost for your deployment - try it free.

What you need to know about provisioned IOPS

• You can provision from a minimum of 1,000 to a maximum of 10,000 IOPS for MySQL & Oracle.
• Minimum of 100GB to a maximum of 1TB storage for MySQL & Oracle.
• You can provision from a minimum of 1,000 to a maximum of 7,000 IOPS for SQL Server.
• Cost: US-East costs $0.10 per IOPS-month while US-West (Northern California) and EU cost $0.11 per IOPS-month. Read below for cost experiment results.
• To adopt provisioned IOPS immediately, you can export data and re-import into a provisioned IOPS RDS instance. An automated way to migrate is coming soon.

Experiment setup

In order to assess the cost of using provisioned IOPS, we ran a simulation on PlanForCloud.com with the following details:

Software: MySQL

RDS type: Large 1-year reserved High-utilized standard (no Multi-AZ)

Storage: 100GB with a 10% growth per six months

Provisioned IOPS: 1,000 with a 10% growth per six months

Location: US-West (Northern California)

Run time: Running 24 hours per day

Experiment results

AWS provisioned IOPS - PlanForCloud

Over three years, the cost of the provisioned IOPS RDS instance is around $11,000, of which $5,093 is the direct cost of provisioned IOPS transactions, meaning:

• 46.5% of the total costs of this deployment are going to provisioned IOPS.
• Relative to the cost of running the database server and the storage requirements, provisioned IOPS can be a significant proportion of your costs. 
• When it comes to critical workloads, this is an option to consider as it delivers high performance I/O.

Conclusion

Provisioned IOPS is a high performance addition to your deployments and intended for a specific target market in mind as Werner Vogels describes in his blog.

Focusing on the advertised 'hourly' cost of cloud resources can be misleading, and looking at your overall deployment costs is very important as it enables you to make better decisions about your deployments prior to adopting the cloud. PlanForCloud is a free tool that enables you to get detailed cost forecasts for different deployment options within minutes and do what-if analysis - try it free, no cloud credentials required.

-- Hassan
Product Manager at PlanForCloud

The Benefits and Risks of Using the Cloud

What are the benefits and risks of using cloud computing from an enterprise perspective? We have compiled a list by analysing over 50 reports.

PlanForCloud.com aims to support enterprises migrate to the cloud. Our Cloud Cost Forecasting tool helps you budget for cloud usage, however cost is only one of the aspects enterprises should look to assess cloud feasibility. We feel that it's important for organisations to have a discussion about the general benefits and risks of using public and private IaaS clouds.

To help you start these discussions, we have put together a spreadsheet of the generic benefits and risks of using cloud computing (public and private) from an enterprise perspective. These benefits and risks have been identified by reviewing over 50 academic papers and industry reports. The spreadsheet is available on Google Docs and provides a starting point for the assessment of the benefits and risks involved in using the cloud.

The spreadsheet has two tabs, one for benefits and one for risks. Each tab describes the benefits / risks and their category (Organisational, Legal, Security, Technical or Financial). We suggest you ask relevant decision makers in your organisation to:

1. Make a copy of this spreadsheet
2. Read through the benefits/risks and set their importance from their perspective
3. Arrange a meeting to discuss the top 5 or 10 benefits and risks from different stakeholder perspectives.

Benefits & Risks of cloud: Google Docs spreadsheet

We hope you find this spreadsheet useful in making informed trade-offs between the benefits and risks of using the cloud.

-- Ali
Technical Lead, PlanForCloud