I have posted a few times about how absurdly expensive all the cloud providers are. If you have a baseline load you should be co-locating bare metal. Any excess capacity you need should spill over into your AWS/GCE/Azure account. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s bl…
you can also pickup an enterprise flash device and have a few terabytes of 500k+IOPs for a few grand whereas reaching a similar performance profile via provisioned IOPs will cost you 10x as much every month.
Using EBS volumes with provisioned IOPS give you some advantages that you don't get with a bare SSD -- like snapshot support and the ability to easily detach it and move it to another server.