Agreed. After a lot of struggles trying to find a good average IOPS on AWS for our database, we just increased disk to 1tb with gp2 and got rid of the problem. It gets 3000 iops/sec all the time and you never have these problems. It's still much cheaper than io1.

It's a trade you must account for when choosing cloud providers, nothing is free. For now it's still cheaper to pay for servers than spend time setting things up ourselves, but we're always measuring cost x benefits and thinking if we need to leave aws. The time is coming, but for now it's still working for us.