Few days ago AWS announced their new tweak for EBS ( Elastic Block Store ). Now We can provision EBS up to 4000 IOPS. This is fourfold increase from the original EBS Provisioned IOPS Volume. Means You can hit it up to 4000 IOPS and up to 1TB of storage provisioned IOPS. Means You do not need to bootstrap ( Raid O ) multiple volumes to reach 4000 IOPS. However if You need more than 4000 IOPS, again You can bootstrap multiple volumes means less bootstrapping.
Just a quick note. If You want to abuse full advantage of high performance Provisioned IOPS, use EBS-Optimized EC2 Instances. M1.large, m1.xlarge, m2.2xlarge, m2.4xlarge, m3.xlarge, m3.2xlarge, c1.xlarge instance types feature dedicated throughput between EC2 and EBS. It is like You need one of available Super Car to fully enjoy Autobahn.
Oh and one more note : it is not available on GovCloud.
Happy Bootstrapping – probably not anymore.
Andreas Wasita 