When you plan and configure EBS volumes for your application, it is important to consider the configuration of the instances that you will attach the volumes to. In order to get the most performance out of your EBS volumes, you should attach them to an instance with enough bandwidth to support your volumes, such as an EBS-optimized instance or an instance with 10 Gigabit network connectivity. This is especially important when you use General Purpose (SSD) or Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes, or when you stripe multiple volumes together in a RAID configuration. Reference: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-ec2-config.html