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Comment by dpc_pw | Hacker News Reader

Hardware storage got really fast and cheap, but on the cloud it seems still super-slow and expensive. AWS's gp2 offers 3 IOPS/GB, and upgrading to something like io2 bleeds money really fast.

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If you don't mind giving up the durability of EBS, you can use an i3 (or similar) instance's ephemeral disks. They should be way faster.

And don’t forget that gp2 is capped at 250MB/sec, and io1 at 500MB/sec. If you need more than this, you’re going to have to pool your EBS volumes in raid0, which is a PITA.

Isn't it 1000MB/s now? Anyway, a decent consumer grade 500GiB SSD that will give you ~5GiB/s is in the ~$100 ballpark. If you take an io1 or io2 volume and crank up the IOPS you will get at most 1/5th of that throughput, but burn through this budget in 2 or 3 days. Even with fairly modest IOPS, you would have amortized a much faster physical drive in single digit number of weeks. With io2 at least you get (in theory) better durability (and a few other goodies) than with a normal SSD, but the price and performance differential is still enormous -- I often wonder what fraction of companies with massive cloud spends have anyone in the approval loop who has an inkling of what premiums they are paying over "normal hardware".

I happen to be consulting for a few large companies that do massive data operations (in the petabyte scale), and I can tell you that “cloud spend” is generally treated as one big blob of money. They don’t really look too much into the details, as the people who care about this (the purchasing department) rarely knows what’s actually driving the costs.

As such, the insane pricing of storage on the clouds rarely comes on the radar, unless you have a “competent” company (I know the fintech companies generally are more clueful about this).

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