Hi – DuckDB Labs devrel here. It's great that you find DuckDB useful!
On the setup side, I agree that local (instance-attached) disks should be preferred but does EBS incur an IO fee? It incurs a significant latency for sure but it doesn't have a per-operation pricing:
> I/O is included in the price of the volumes, so you pay only for each GB of storage you provision.
Can’t remember anymore, but it’s either (a) the gp2 volumes were way too slow for the ops or (b) the IOPs charges made it bad. To be clear I didn’t do it on duckdb but hosted a Postgres. I moved to light sail instead and was happy with it (you don’t get attached SSD in ec2 until you go to instances that are super large).
On the setup side, I agree that local (instance-attached) disks should be preferred but does EBS incur an IO fee? It incurs a significant latency for sure but it doesn't have a per-operation pricing:
> I/O is included in the price of the volumes, so you pay only for each GB of storage you provision.
(https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/)