SSDs have become fast, except in the cloud

Seeing the really just puny "provisioned IOPS" numbers on hugely expensive cloud instances made me chuckle (first in disbelief, then in horror) when I joined a "cloud-first" enterprise shop in 2020 (having come from a company that hosted their own hardware at a colo).

It's no wonder that many people nowadays, esp. those who are so young that they've never experienced anything but cloud instances, seem to have little idea of how much performance you can actually pack in just one or two RUs today. Ultra-fast (I'm not parroting some marketing speak here - I just take a look at IOPS numbers, and compare them to those from highest-end storage some 10-12 years ago) NVMe storage is a big part of that astonishing magic.

> It's no wonder that many people nowadays, esp. those who are so young that they've never experienced anything but cloud instances, seem to have little idea of how much performance you can actually pack in just one or two RUs today.

On the contrary, young people often show up having learned on their super fast Apple SSD or a top of the line gaming machine with NVMe SSD.

Many know what hardware can do. There’s no need to dunk on young people.

Anyway, the cloud performance realities are well know to anyone who works in cloud performance. It’s part of the game and it’s learned by anyone scaling a system. It doesn’t really matter what you could do if you build a couple RUs yourself and hauled them down to the data center, because beyond simple single-purpose applications with flexible uptime requirements, that’s not a realistic option.

> because beyond simple single-purpose applications with flexible uptime requirements, that’s not a realistic option.

I frequently hear this point expressed in cloud vs colo debates. The notion that you can't achieve high availability with simple colo deploys is just nonsense.

Two colo deploys in two geographically distinct datacenters, two active physical servers with identical builds (RAIDed drives, dual NICs, A+B power) in both datacenters, a third server racked up just sitting as a cold spare, pick your favorite container orchestration scheme, rig up your database replication, script the database failover activation process, add HAProxy (or use whatever built-in scheme your orchestration system offers), sprinkle in a cloud service for DNS load balancing/failover (Cloudflare or AWS Route 53), automate and store backups off-site and you're done.

Yes it's a lot of work, but so is configuring a similar level of redundancy and high availability in AWS. I've done it both ways and I prefer the bare metal colo approach. With colo you get vastly more bang for your buck and when things go wrong, you have a greater ability to get hands on, understand exactly what's going on and fix it immediately.