SSDs have become fast, except in the cloud

This was a huge technical problem I worked on at Google, and is sort of fundamental to a cloud. I believe this is actually a big deal that drives peoples' technology directions.

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.

So much of this. The amount of times I've seen someone complain about slow DB performance when they're trying to connect to it from a different VPC, and bottlenecking themselves to 100Mbits is stupidly high.

Literally depending on where things are in a data center... If you're looking for closely coupled and on a 10G line on the same switch, going to the same server rack. I bet you performance will be so much more consistent.

> Literally depending on where things are in a data center

I thought cloud was supposed to abstract this away? That's a bit of a sarcastic question from a long-time cloud skeptic, but... wasn't it?

Reality always beats the abstraction. After all, it's just somebody else's computer in somebody else's data center.

Which can cause considerable "amusement" depending on the provider - one I won't name directly but is much more centered on actual renting racks than their (now) cloud offering - if you had a virtual machine older than a year or so, deleting and restoring it would get you on a newer "host" and you'd be faster for the same cost.

Otherwise it'd stay on the same physical piece of hardware it was allocated to when new.

Amusing is a good description.

"Hardware degradation detected, please turn it off and back on again"

I could do a migration with zero downtime in VMware for a decade but they can't seamlessly move my VM to a machine that works in 2024? Great, thanks. Amusing.