That's still terrible performance, your average MacBook Pro these days will provide between 100,000 and 300,000 IOP/s on 4k random reads and the average VM we deploy from our storage servers (commodity SSD based linux clusters that are cheap and ultra reliable) provide between 70,000-200,000 random 4k read (and write) IOPs per VM without a sweat and their TCO is significantly lower than amazons SSD storage that's 3 ½ - 10x slower per volume.

Even if you go and provision storage on Vultr, Ramnode or Sitehost all of which are a lot cheaper options and just as if not more reliable provide considerably faster storage with a minimum of 20/30,000 IOPs up to 150,000 IOPs per volume and you don't have the vendor lock-in or the hidden costs such as inter-zone data transfer etc...

Amazon really needs to pull finger on their storage performance, but it's not in their best interest. What they want you to do is scale horizontally which means not only do you need to invest in your system / product design to do this but you also have to put more money into Amazons pockets for additional compute / storage nodes and again the associated hidden costs.

I'm not digging on Amazon / outsourced hosting providers but they truly are pulling the wool over people's eyes while still trying to make everyone think that they're not only the best option they're the only option.