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Comment by jmvoodoo | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of comparison on CPU speed and RAM, which is fine, but it seems to me that EC2's biggest weakness is the miserable IO performance of EBS.

If Google has solved the EBS problem, then this could be amazing.

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This is exactly what interests me. I keep 20 servers in colocation facility because I have I/O requirements that can't be reliably met with EBS. Solve that problem and I'll move as soon as my colo contract term expires.

You can only do so much with gigabit ethernet. Add to that the fact that whatever apps you're running are competing for that same bandwidth and it's super hard to get good I/O out of it.

What about 10Gb ethernet? 10Gb NICs can be bought for under $200 a piece these days, and 10Gb switches can be bought for under $100 per port. Yes, it's more expensive than 1Gb, but that doesn't mean you can exclude it as an option.

Gigabit is not the reason an EBS volume is limited to 100 IOPS. Forcing all customers to use 1 TB SATA drives regardless of their needs or budget seems like the more likely reason.

For around $1000/server (including switch port costs), a cloud provider could install 2 10Gb ethernet cards into each machine, and run them in an LACP trunk to create an effective 20Gb link.

I keep hoping that somebody will do that, hook the other end to an SSD target, and sell me a 'high I/O' node. I want to stop dealing with hardware and colo facility contracts and I doubt I'm alone.

Ssssh, quit trying to inject reality into the cloud.

Apparently Amazon is going to be offering an SSD product at some point to cater to those with IO bound needs.

But agreed that EBS really hurts overall performance.

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