[mlhpdx]

Is S3 slow or fast? It’s both, as far as I can tell and represents a class of systems (mine included) that go slow to go fast.

S3 is “slow” at the level of a single request. It’s fast at the level of making as many requests as needed in parallel.

Being “fast” is sometimes critical, and often aesthetic.

[claytonjy]

We have common words for those two flavors of “fast” already: latency and throughput. S3 has high latency (arguable!), but very very high throughput.