[treflop]

Cloud makes provisioning more servers quicker because you are paying someone to basically have a bunch of servers ready to go right away with an API call instead of a phone call, maintained by a team that isn’t yours, with economies of scale working for the provider.

Cloud does not do anything else.

None of these latency/speed problems are cloud-specific. If you have on-premise servers and you are storing your data on network-attached storage, you have the exact same problems (and also the same advantages).

Unfortunately the gap between local and network storage is wide. You win some, you lose some.

[silverquiet]

Oh, I'm not a complete neophyte (in what seems like a different life now, I worked for a big hosting provider actually), I was just surprised that there was a big penalty for cross-VPC traffic implied by the parent poster.