SSDs have become fast, except in the cloud

I think the obvious answer is there's not much demand, and keeping it "low" allows trickery and funny business with the virtualization layer (think: SAN, etc) that you can't do with "raw hardware speed".

Sure, but it does make me wonder what kind of speeds we are paying for if we can't even get raw hardware speeds...

Sounds like one more excuse for AWS to obfuscate any meaning in their billing structure and take control of the narrative.

How much are they getting away with by virtualization. (Think how banks use your money for loans and stuff)

You actually don't get to really see the internals other than IOPS which doesn't help when it's gatekept already.

True but the funny business buys a lot of fault tolerance, and predictable performance if not maximum performance.

There is no trickery with AWS instance stores, they are honest to god local disks.

The biggest "scam" if you can call it that is reducing all factors of CPU performance to "cores".

I ended up buying a SATA SSD for 50 euros to stick in an old laptop that I was already using as server and, my god, it is so much faster than the thing I was trying to run on digitalocean. The DO VPS barely beat the old 5400 rpm spinning rust that was in the laptop originally (the reason why I was trying to rent a fast, advertised-with-SSD, server). Doing this i/o task effectively in the cloud, at least with DO, seems to require putting it in RAM which was a bit expensive for the few hundred gigabytes of data I wanted to process into an indexed format

So there is demand, but I'm certainly not interested in paying many multiples of 50 euros over an expected lifespan of a few years, so it may not make economic sense for them to offer it to users like me at least. On the other hand, for the couple hours this should have taken (rather than the days it initially did), I'd certainly have been willing to pay that cloud premium and that's why I tried to get me one of these allegedly SSD-backed VPSes... but now that I have a fast system permanently, I don't think that was a wise decision of past me

I'd argue the even bigger scam is charging for egress data transfer rather than just for the size of the pipe.

AWS is pretty transparent about what sort of cores you are exactly getting, and has different types available for different use-cases; typical example would something like r7iz that is aimed for peak single-threaded perf https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/r7iz/