AWS iops vs disk iops?

Recently devops guy from our company told me that our local mysql stage environment are much faster than aws, because local disk has 10k iops, but our aws rds has only 500 iops. As far as I understand aws iops states for throughout capacity, not the disk speed. And still ssd disk io same 10k iops or more? And considering that the load is less than 500 iops, rds might be much faster?