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.

This is untrue of Local SSD (https://cloud.google.com/local-ssd) in Google Cloud. Local SSDs are PCIe peripherals, not network attached.

There are also multiple Persistent Disk (https://cloud.google.com/persistent-disk) offerings that are backed by SSDs over the network.

(I'm an engineer on GCE. I work directly on the physical hardware that backs our virtualization platform.)

It's notable that your second link has a screenshot for 24(!) NVMe SSDs totalling 9 terabytes, but the aggregate performance is 2.4M IOPS and 9.3 GB/s for reads. In other words, just 100K/400MB per individual SSD, which is very low these days.

For comparison, a single 1 TB consumer SSD can deliver comparable numbers (lower IOPS but higher throughput).

If I plugged 24 consumer SSDs into a box, I would expect over 30M IOPS and near the memory bus limit for throughput (>50 GB/s).