That's what we typically do to scale most EBS volumes (critical disk-intensive workloads run on io1 anyway). Instead of switching directly io1 we over-provision

That's what we typically do to scale most EBS volumes (critical disk-intensive workloads run on io1 anyway). Instead of switching directly io1 we over-provision space which solves most IOPS issues. We recently upgraded one of our etcd clusters from v2 to v3 and it turned out that etcd v3 uses significantly more IOPS than v2, using EBS burst credit during periods with normal load. Our solution was to increase the EBS volume sizes from 16GB to 50GB (100 IOPS -> 150 IOPS [1]). Our costs went from $1.6 per volume to $5, instead of $11.75 for io1, for a comparable performance for this particular application. 1: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSVolumeTypes.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSVolume...