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.

Aren’t 10G and 100G connections standard nowadays in data centers? Heck, I thought they were standard 10 years ago.

Bandwidth delay product does not help serialized transactions. If you're reaching out to disk for results, or if you have locking transactions on a table the achievable operations drops dramatically as latency between the host and the disk increases.

The typical way to trade bandwidth away for latency would, I guess, be speculative requests. In the CPU world at least. I wonder if any cloud providers have some sort of framework built around speculative disk reads (or maybe it is a totally crazy trade to make in this context)?