AWS launches new I/O service for cloud databases

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Maxwell Cooter.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is looking to crack a thorny problem for cloud computing – the ability to run high-performance databases. Applications with I/O intensive workloads rely on consistent response times and that’s not always been easy for cloud to deliver.

AWS’s attempt to tackle this problem is a new service called Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Provisioned IOPS. The system has been designed to offer AWS customers the ability to specify volume size and volume performance so that Amazon EBS will deliver that specified performance.

According to AWS, customers will be able to provision an EBS volume through the AWS management console. Currently, users are limited to 1,000 IOPS per Provisioned IOPS volume – although AWS hopes to deliver higher limits shortly…

One beta user that has been making use of the new service is NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The research organisation has a need for consistent performance of I/O and NASA has been using Amazon EBS to provision flexible compute capacity and is set to power a new series of I/O-intensive scientific from radar data processing to the quest of black holes.

"Customers have been asking for the ability to set their performance rate to achieve consistently high performance,” said Peter De Santis, vice president of Amazon EC2. "With EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes, EBS-Optimised instances and the recently launched High I/O SSD-based EC2 instances, customers have a range of choices for running their most demanding applications and databases on AWS while achieving peak performance in a predictable manner."