Difficulty: Medium
Description
We identified EBS volumes in your account using the io1 storage type, designed for high-performance workloads. Based on their current IOPS configuration, migrating to gp3 would deliver equivalent or better performance at a significantly lower cost, since gp3 supports up to 16,000 IOPS at a fraction of the io1 price.
Selection Criteria
The EBS volume uses the io1 storage type.
The EBS volume has been in active use (
in-use) for the last 7 days.The EBS volume has provisioned IOPS of less than 16,000 (gp3 maximum IOPS limit).
The EBS volume has only one attachment (multi-attach io1 volumes are not eligible for migration to gp3).
Expected Saving
Up to ~87% reduction on EBS storage and IOPS costs depending on volume size and provisioned IOPS.
Cost component | io1 (us-east-1) | gp3 (us-east-1) |
Storage | $0.125/GB-month | $0.08/GB-month |
IOPS (above baseline) | $0.065/IOPS-month | $0.005/IOPS-month (above 3,000) |
Example: a 500 GB io1 volume with 5,000 IOPS:
io1 cost: (500 × $0.125) + (5,000 × $0.065) = $62.50 + $325.00 = $387.50/month
gp3 cost: (500 × $0.08) + (2,000 × $0.005) = $40.00 + $10.00 = $50.00/month
Annual saving: ~$4,050/year (~87% reduction)
Operational Impact
Downtime: None — the volume type modification is performed in-place via the ModifyVolume API. The instance and volume remain fully operational throughout the conversion.
Breaking change: None — io1 and gp3 share the same EBS interface. No application code or configuration changes are required.
Data risk: None — the conversion is non-destructive. All data is preserved.
IOPS verification ⚠️: io1 volumes are often provisioned for I/O-intensive workloads. Before migrating, it is important to validate that the actual consumed IOPS (not just provisioned) are within gp3's supported range (max 16,000 IOPS). Over-provisioned io1 volumes are prime candidates; heavily utilized ones may not be suitable.
Multi-attach exclusion: io1 volumes with multi-attach enabled cannot be migrated to gp3 and are automatically excluded by the selection criteria.
Transition time: Conversion may take several minutes to hours depending on volume size. Performance remains available during the process.