As per AWS SLA if the instance is attached to an EBS-Optimized instance, then the Provisioned IOPS volumes are designed to deliver within 10% of the provisioned IOPS performance 99.9% of the time in a given year. Thus, if the user has created a volume of 1000 IOPS, the user will get a minimum 900 IOPS 99.9% time of the year. Reference: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/