After getting the email this morning about the new provisioned IOPS EBS volumes, I took a small test drive. 
It is really easy to get yourself a provisioned IOPS volume; when creating the volume there’s a new selection.
One of the things that has long annoyed me about Amazon EC2 network and storage performance is that it is highly variable. The target for provisioned IOPS is exactly in the sweet spot of where I want it to be; database servers.
With provisioned IOPS, it appears that we’re seeing the first semblance of SLA’s or guaranteed quality of service for storage in the cloud. This is huge!
I’ve setup a multi-volume RAID set and am running performance tests and the numbers look good but what I like the most so far is that they are steady. That’s just awesome! More to come as I get the results.
Hype Cycles 
Any outcome on your benchmarks? We are seeing some mixed results with provisioned iops over here, with 500 iops permitted, and a 4xraid 0 setup. We see non-provisioned volumes performing much better at bursts, and better on average.
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The reason I haven’t published any numbers is because they weren’t as impressive as I thought they would be and I wanted to check them out further. In my experience thus far, IOPS provisioned storage don’t always perform better but they perform more consistently.
You are right that sometimes non IOPS provisioned storage does perform better than IOPS provisioned storage.
I’ve done my testing in us-east AZ.
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