I think the AWS failures on iops tests should've been examined more prior to publication, or at least explained more to the reader.

AWS General Purpose EBS volumes scale based on volume size, so a purely naively-done test with a default AMI's performance could be as low as 24 iops (8GB*3 IOPS per GB) once exhausting it's burst iops quota. I think it's unfair to compare apples to oranges here, as you can make these volumes scale to absurd numbers, if you have the cash.