The pedantic answer would be to allow customers to specify both minimum storage space and minimum IOPS. Then charge them for whichever is the larger portion of

The pedantic answer would be to allow customers to specify both minimum storage space and minimum IOPS. Then charge them for whichever is the larger portion of a drive and provide the space and IOPS that they are then paying for. This way, if you need 10MB but also 25,000 IOPS, then you'll pay for ~10% of a drive. You'll get your minimum required 25,000 IOPS....and also 200GB or whatever share of the drive is required to get you those IOPS. At the end of the day, I'm not entirely sure it matters whether the cloud provider breaks it out like this as long as it at least has a little gray UI element under the specified storage space slider that reads out the IOPS to you. It would be exactly the same as the current situation where customers do this manually. So probably not particularly necessary - why make customers fill in additional fields they might not need to? I do think cloud providers should make it clear during requisition and read back how many IOPS you're getting, just for clarity. It does seem like having temporarily high quotas and then throttling back seems to break developer experience. Good deeds and punishment - but in this case there's a solid underlying reason why it has detrimental effects.