[londons_explore]

You can tradeoff talk latency vs cost yourself easily.

For example, you could have two copies of your data in the block store, and issue reads to both simultaneously, and use whichever returns first. Suddenly, your 99% latency becomes your 99.99% latency...

You can do the same for writes (albeit a bit more complex).

[planckscnst]

Yes, the cost/latency trade-off is exactly why this can be interesting. Significantly fewer or less-impactful outliers can save a lot of money (or allow a better SLA with the same cost).