SSDs have become fast, except in the cloud

SSDs in the cloud are attached over a network, and fundamentally have to be. The problem is that this network is so large and slow that it can't give you anywhere near the performance of a local SSD. This wasn't a problem for hard drives, which was the backing technology when a lot of these network attached storage systems were invented, because they are fundamentally slow compared to networks, but it is a problem for SSD.

Also, the article isn't just about SSDs being no faster than a network. It's about SSDs being two orders of magnitude slower than datacenter networks.

Could that have to do with every operation requiring a round trip, rather than being able to queue up operations in a buffer to saturate throughput?

It seems plausible if the interface protocol was built for a device it assumed was physically local and so waited for confirmation after each operation before performing the next.

In this case it's not so much the throughput rate that matters, but the latency -- which can also be heavily affected by buffering of other network traffic.