When cloud providers advertise “Guaranteed IOPS,” most people assume:“I’ll always get X IOPS, no matter what.”That interpretation is operationally naïve. The guarantee refers to minimum allocated capability, not to the performance your application will actually experience. 1. Guaranteed IOPS = minimum capability, not magic performance “Guaranteed IOPS” is about capacity, not about how fast every single I/O will feel to your application. Providers typically base their guarantees on ideal, synthetic tests (e.g. 4K random reads/writes, high queue depth). In reality:…