But why then would the article mention that they had problems with reliability? That seems ... odd; what have you experienced in your working with these (assuming you have)?
The normal course of action for this is usually to have a raid array over all your nvme disks, but since google just migrates your VM to a machine that has good disks, doing that is useless.
Really this whole article is "we are going to keep using google cloud despite their storage options being unfit for our purpose and here's how".
And that's called hacking. Welcome to Hacker News. Discord's engineers are gods among mortals for squeezing this kind of latency and reliability out of something Google intended for consumers. Yes I know the way you're supposed to do something like this is to use something like Cloud BigTable where you probably have to call a salesperson and pay $20,000 before you're even allowed to try the thing. But Discord just ignored the enterprisey solution and took what they needed from the consumer tools instead. It reminds me of how early Google used to build data centers out of cheap personal computers.
In such a world, perhaps those who remember there's a world of flexibility and power within the OS could be seen as welding some supernatural power.
Hmm, I read it more like they figured out a way to scale their existing storage a bit better while making Google eat the cost.
It’s not like they pay extra if they wear out the disks sooner.