Database IOPS and why it's important?

One of the more crucial metric to gauge a database's performance is checking the IOPS (reads and write).

Input Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) is a metric which tells us the performance of a storage device like hard drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), and storage area networks (SANs).

In the context of disk reads and writes, IOPS propagates the information pertaining to the number of operations (reads and writes) a storage device can handle in one second.

Why is measuring or monitoring IOPS important?
Simply put, teams need to do capacity planning. By understanding the IOPS requirements of applications and comparing them with the IOPS capabilities of storage devices, we can make informed decisions when provisioning new storage or when scaling existing infrastructure. This in turn gives us information about cost planning, latency metrics, end-user experience and so on and so forth.

If you are using MySQL, you can use the SHOW GLOBAL STATUS command and look at the Innodb_data_reads, Innodb_data_writes for the number of read and write operations. Cloud solutions providers typically offer monitoring tools which will have DiskIO as a metric.

If you like reading about insights into software engineering, consider subscribing to my weekly newsletter, <Hello World!>. We have more than 300 subscribers at the moment.