I'm looking at the pricing for the new SSD storage volumes here, and I see that there is no listed charge for per 1 million I/O requests like there is with magnetic volumes.
Does that mean there is no charge for reads/writes like there is with the old magnetic volumes? That doesn't make sense to me, why wouldn't there be a charge for that? Do SSD's not degrade with use like HDD's?
That is correct, there is only the charge for storage provisioned. From the AWS Blog:
General Purpose (SSD) volumes take advantage of the increasing cost-effectiveness of SSD storage to offer customers 10x more IOPS, 1/10th the latency, and more bandwidth and consistent performance than offerings based on magnetic storage. With a simple pricing structure where you only pay for the storage provisioned (no need to provision IOPS or to factor in the cost of I/O operations), the new volumes are priced as low as $0.10/GB-month.
General Purpose (SSD) volumes are designed to provide more than enough performance for a broad set of workloads all at a low cost. They predictably burst up to 3,000 IOPS, and reliably deliver 3 sustained IOPS for every GB of configured storage. In other words, a 10 GB volume will reliably deliver 30 IOPS and a 100 GB volume will reliably deliver 300 IOPS. There are more details on the mechanics of the burst model below, but most applications won't exceed their burst and actual performance will usually be higher than the baseline. The volumes are designed to deliver the configured level of IOPS performance with 99% consistency.
In other words, the old I/O pricing model wouldn't make much sense with these new volumes. Sustained IOPS seem bound to the amount of storage on your volume. It seems preferential to likewise combine those now-related costs instead of charging you for I/O requests separately.
