Apparatus and method to perform quality of service based handling of input/output (IO) requests are disclosed herein. In embodiments, one or more processors include a module that is to allocate an input/output (IO) request command, associated with an IO request originated within a compute node, to a particular first queue of a plurality of first queues based at in part on IO request type information included in the IO request command, the compute node and the apparatus distributed over a network and the plurality of first queues associated with different submission handling priority levels among each other, and wherein the module allocates the IO request command queued within the particular first queue to a particular second queue of a plurality of second queues based at least in part on affinity of a first submission handling priority level associated with the particular first queue to current quality of service (QoS) attributes of a subset of the one or more storage devices associated with the particular second queue.