[HN Gopher] Cloudspecs: Cloud Hardware Evolution Through the Loo...
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       Cloudspecs: Cloud Hardware Evolution Through the Looking Glass
        
       Author : speckx
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2026-01-09 16:23 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (muratbuffalo.blogspot.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (muratbuffalo.blogspot.com)
        
       | mad44 wrote:
       | Does anyone have any explanation or theories about the NVME SSDs
       | pricing anomaly?
        
         | till-tum wrote:
         | I don't think this can be definitively answered without working
         | for one of the hyperscalers. But here are some speculations: 1.
         | Device speeds are intentionally capped to increase device
         | lifetime (but this would only make sense for writes) 2.
         | Networked storage services like EBS are more profitable, and
         | AWS would like to phase out instance-attached storage. 3.
         | Technical limitations/virtualization overhead (See comment
         | above). I don't have enough insight of how AWS SSDs work under
         | the hood, but high network throughput (600 Gbit/s) is possible
         | even in virtualized instances. Then again, we have certainly
         | seen some weird noisy neighbor effects on cloud SSDs. However,
         | it's worth mentioning that the same throughput limitations also
         | apply to bare metal instances, where users don't benefit from
         | virtualization (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ec2/latest/instance
         | types/so.html...). 4. There's too little customer demand for
         | fast SSDs, and optimization is not worth the effort.
        
           | neerajsi wrote:
           | Speculating: local ssds aren't as valuable in the cloud since
           | they're effectively ephemeral. If the instance restarts, it
           | would lose its storage. Trying to keep a workload affinitized
           | to an SSD or to migrate data to a different SSD when an
           | instance moves increases cost prohibitively.
        
             | till-tum wrote:
             | For a lot of use cases such as caching (e.g., the ephemeral
             | caching layer in Snowflake), ephemeral storage is good
             | enough. If you really want to, you could also achieve
             | persistence by replicating to multiple instances (afaik
             | this is what DynamoDB does)
        
           | huntaub wrote:
           | I think that number 4 is the big one. AWS only has so much
           | capacity to work on new hardware types, and the number of
           | companies who want to work with on-device NVMe are WAY
           | smaller than then number of companies who just want to slap
           | Kubernetes on some instances with EBS.
        
       | donavanm wrote:
       | > The first NVMe-backed instance family, i3, appeared in 2016. As
       | of 2025, AWS offers 36 NVMe instance families. Yet the i3 still
       | delivers the best I/O performance per dollar by nearly 2x.
       | 
       | Article should probably explicitly call out the difference
       | between directly attached nvme storage (good ol i3) and "nitro
       | nvme" (m6id and friends). The later is provided via an embedded
       | card which emulates/provides a virtual nvme device directly to
       | the host/instance. Without digging in to the specifics Im oretty
       | sure thats accounting for the $/perf numbers being relatively
       | flat. And "i" series being local storage cost/perf optimized
       | compared to other families.
       | 
       | Edit: see
       | https://d1.awsstatic.com/events/reinvent/2021/Powering_nextg...
       | and similar talks. And notice the language around benefits of
       | more consistent performance due to the better mediation of
       | resources.
        
         | huntaub wrote:
         | Yeah, I would keep in mind that not everyone is optimmizing for
         | $/perf, some use cases (where data is colder) are optimizing
         | for $/GiB stored.
        
       | dweekly wrote:
       | I think one interesting context to consider in this is cloud
       | repatriation. Economics that didn't really pencil out half a
       | decade ago may be worth revisiting for a lot of organizations who
       | now find that their actual bare metal needs are quite modest and
       | can be well met by a few modern servers. The IOPS/$ graph here
       | contrasting on-prem w/cloud in particular is quite telling.
        
         | pixl97 wrote:
         | I've seen a lot of workloads that had multiple servers or large
         | RAID'ed NAS devices get shrank down to a single server after a
         | single NVMe could provide more than enough random IOPS.
        
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       (page generated 2026-01-09 23:01 UTC)