[rbranson]

> 1. The ratelimit on "IOPS" is precisely a ratelimit on a particular kind of network traffic, right? Namely traffic to/from an EBS volume? "IOPS" really means "EBS volume network traffic"?

The EBS volume itself has a provisioned capacity of IOPS and throughput, and the EC2 instance it's attached to will have its own limits as well across all the EBS volumes attached to it. I would characterize it more like a different model. An EBS volume isn't just just a slice of a physical PCB attached to a PCIe bus, it's a share in a large distributed system a large number of physical drives with its own dedicated network capacity to/from compute, like a SAN.

> 2. Does this save me money? And if yes, is from some weird AWS arbitrage? Or is it more because of an efficiency win from doing less EBS networking?

It might. It's a set of trade-offs.

[ucarion]

That makes sense. The weirdness of https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ebs/latest/userguide/ebs-io-char... makes more sense now. Reminds me of DynamoDB capacity units.