Patent attributes
Customers of a shared-resource environment can provision resources in a fine-grained manner that meets specific performance requirements. A customer can provision a data volume with a committed rate of Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) and pay only for that commitment (plus any overage), and the amount of storage requested. The customer will then at any time be able to complete at least the committed rate of IOPS. If the customer generates submissions at a rate that exceeds the committed rate, the resource can still process at the higher rate when the system is not under pressure. Even under pressure, the system will deliver at least the committed rate. Multiple customers can be provisioned on the same resource, and more than one customer can have a committed rate on that resource. Customers without committed or guaranteed rates can utilize the uncommitted portion, or committed portions that are not being used.