Amazon Web Services is now offering new features for customers looking to run high-performance databases in the cloud by launching Elastic Block Store (EBS) Provisioned IOPS.

Provisioned IOPS (input/output operations per second) are a new EBS volume type designed to deliver predictable high performance for I/O-intensive workloads, such as database applications, that rely on consistent and fast response times.

With Provisioned IOPS, customers can specify both volume size and volume performance, and EBS will consistently deliver the desired performance over the lifetime of the volume.

Provisioned IOPS volumes are engineered so customers can develop, test and deploy production applications and get their desired performance.

Amazon says that with a few clicks in its Management Console customers can create an EBS volume provisioned with the storage and IOPS they need and attach it to their EC2 instance.

EBS currently supports up to 1,000 IOPS per Provisioned IOPS volume, with plans to deliver higher limits soon.

Customers can attach multiple EBS volumes to an EC2 instance and stripe across them to deliver thousands of IOPS to their application.

To enable EC2 instances that fully utilize the IOPS provisioned on an EBS volume, EC2 is introducing the ability to launch selected EC2 instance types as EBS-Optimized instances.

EBS-Optimized instances deliver dedicated throughput between EC2 and EBS, with options between 500 megabits a second and 1,000 megabits a second depending on the instance type used.

The combination of EBS Provisioned IOPS and EBS-Optimized instances is supposed to let customers run their most performance-sensitive applications on EC2, giving them predictable scaling with the same ease of use, durability and flexibility of provisioning benefits they expect from EC2 and EBS.

See http://aws.amazon.com/ebs.