[ahepp]

One question I have is, I thought the cloud was supposed to abstract this kind of stuff away? Shouldn’t cloud services be sold in the “solution domain” rather than by picking the backing technology behind your tool?

For example, why not have a file/object/whatever storage service; and a price matrix that lets you select key metrics like latency, throughput, and variability of either?

I don’t particularly care if my ultra fast ultra low latency is derived from SSDs, spinning rust, RAM, l2 cache, or acoustic ripples. But I’m not super in tune with cloud services to begin with.

[acdha]

There are effectively three tiers: managed storage services like S3 (object storage), EFS (NFS NAS), or FSX (clustered filesystem) where most of the decisions are made for you; the mid-level EBS (SAN) service; and storage-optimized instance types with local disks which you manage.

This custom SSD hardware family is what powers the EBS (cloud SAN) service, which allows you to pay for the performance level you need, where they give it both higher absolute performance and [now] better worst-case latency.

This announcement is saying that you can now get your own instances with the same performance characteristics for situations where you need better performance than a SAN can deliver and/or the robustness benefits of using per-node storage rather than a separate networked service.

The other part of this announcement is the implicit message it sends about the competition: they're telling everyone that their storage performance is more consistent than their competitors and increasing the number of areas where they can say they have an option which a competitor does not. Noting that this was driven by the EBS storage team is also a reminder that they have more people working on lower-level infrastructure problems than you likely do.

[rawtxapp]

I think it comes down to the fact that at the end of the day, your software runs on real hardware, which isn't perfect. So rather than hide these imperfections behind an opaque surface, AWS let's you peek behind the scenes to optimize your software, debug issues, etc. It's really useful if you're working at a large scale.

They also have things like Lightsail if you don't care about the details and just want the packaged solution.

[MR4D]

They already do. But some customers want to more finely control the various trade offs with different technology implementations, and services like this allow them to do so. Everyone else can keep using what they already have.

[dikei]

But it is abstract away, you just need to define your IOPS requirements, then pick the cheapest volume type that can satisfy it. You wouldn't have to choose if SSD is as cheap as HDD, but alas we're not there yet.

Comparing to life before the cloud, you would have to choose the vendor, the size of your drives, how many drive, then go through the procurement process, months in advance.

[tw04]

The cloud is 90% renting other peoples servers and 10% “I just want to write an app”. Based on the feedback I’ve seen on HN, that 10% quickly finds out the inconsistent performance of the paas will eventually become an issue.

[judge2020]

If I’m not mistaken, EBS (as in, elastic block storage) already allows this, but it often won’t beat the latency of a local SSD.