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SSDs have become fast, except in the cloud

(databasearchitects.blogspot.com)
589 points greghn | 1 comments | 20 Feb 24 16:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.358s | source
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pclmulqdq ◴[20 Feb 24 17:22 UTC] No.39443994[source]▶
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.

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1. ec109685 ◴[21 Feb 24 04:01 UTC] No.39449994[source]▶
This is an interesting benchmark that compares disk read latency across different clouds across various disk configurations, including SSD's and EBS: https://github.com/scylladb/diskplorer

Google's disk perform quite poorly.

And how Discord worked around it: https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-supercharges-network-di...