[hoka]

I guess my original post was focused on map/reduce problems; I meant it to be more general. We take our site response time very seriously, and therefore our application code and data layer has to be very fast.

Yes boxes are faster and easier to spin up. The 'downside' to that is that many website on the internet are blazingly fast: Google, Amazon, Dropbox, etc. Because they are so fast (or perceptibly fast via tricks), the rest of the web is held to that higher standard. Twenty years ago, things taking a long time on a computer screen with no updates was acceptable. Today it really isn't because there are N other websites that are selling your exact product or experience.