EBS volumes paying for provisioned IOPS they don't use
Performance provisioned beyond what the workload consumes is billed separately, every month, whether or not anyone needs it.
What this problem is
In EBS, capacity and performance are billed separately. A gp3 volume ships with 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/s at no extra charge; above that, each additional IOPS and MB/s carries its own price. On io1 and io2 volumes, provisioned IOPS is the larger share of the bill, not the storage.
That produces two different kinds of waste. The first is a gp3 volume with extra IOPS provisioned that the workload never reaches — someone raised the number while chasing a slowdown, the cause turned out to be elsewhere, and the setting stayed. The second is an io1 or io2 volume whose IOPS sits comfortably inside what gp3 delivers: that is premium-class pricing for performance the general-purpose class already covers.
Converting io1 or io2 to gp3 is online and non-destructive — the volume stays attached and the instance keeps running. It is one of the few storage cost fixes that needs no maintenance window.
How we detect it
We list volumes across every enabled region with DescribeVolumes, which reports type, size, provisioned IOPS and throughput. We compare what is provisioned against gp3's included baseline and against the range gp3 supports.
- gp3 volumes paying for extra IOPS/throughput
- io1/io2 volumes cheaper on gp3
What it costs
On gp3, IOPS above 3,000 runs about $0.005 per IOPS-month and throughput above 125 MB/s about $0.04 per MB/s-month. On io2, provisioned IOPS runs about $0.065 per IOPS-month — more than ten times gp3's rate (us-east-1).
Public AWS list prices, us-east-1, subject to change. The figure in your report is computed against your resources in your regions.
How it appears in the report
An illustrative example, with invented resources and figures. In the report each finding carries the real resource, its region, and the fix command where a safe one exists.
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