Amazon Input/Output Service Guarantee Simplifies Cloud Management

Moving toward Service Levels and away from Implementation Details a boon to system managers, developers and database administrators.

Amazon recently announced Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS, a service that guarantees a level of input output performance.  Like Amazon’s Simple Queue Service (SQS), the new IOPS guarantee allows us to manage components based on service levels rather than on implementation details.

According to the Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) page:

Provisioned IOPS volumes are designed to deliver predictable, high performance for I/O intensive workloads such as databases. With Provisioned IOPS, you specify an IOPS rate when creating a volume, and then Amazon EBS provisions that rate for the lifetime of the volume. Amazon EBS currently supports up to 1000 IOPS per Provisioned IOPS volume, with higher limits coming soon. You can stripe multiple volumes together to deliver thousands of IOPS per Amazon EC2 instance to your application.

This is good news for database administrators.  Now you can provision a volume with the level of performance you need.  Before this service how could you know what kind of performance to expect from your database?  You could run a mix of transactions that reflect your typical load on monitor performance to get an idea of IOPS performance. Of course to make a reasonably accurate assessment you’d have to run these tests a number of times at different times and with different volumes.

By offering IOPS guarantees Amazon is continuing to do what it has always done in the cloud: relieve system managers, developers and database administrators from some of the burdens of implementing compute and storage services.   It’s a win for Amazon, too. Now they can charge a premium for guaranteed IOPS on its EBS system.

We should expect to see more service level offerings like this.  A cloud provider might offer a premium message queue service with better performance than found in today’s simple services.

For example, you may be running RabbitMQ or another message queue in the cloud because Amazon’s SQS doesn’t meet your performance requirements.  If you could avoid managing a middleware component while getting the performance you need, wouldn’t you do it?

It’s an especially compelling option if the marginal cost of the premium service is offset by the savings you realize by not running and managing another middleware component.

Dan Sullivan is an author, systems architect, and consultant with over 20 years of IT experience with engagements in systems architecture, enterprise security, advanced analytics and business intelligence. He has worked in a broad range of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, software development, government, retail, gas and oil production, power generation, life sciences, and education.  Dan has written 16 books and numerous articles and white papers about topics ranging from data warehousing, Cloud Computing and advanced analytics to security management, collaboration, and text mining.

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