All competitors seem to outstrip AWS on this. Do they have some legacy infrastructure that is just too big too upgrade to something more modern, or is this "on purpose"?
The downside is that the access methods for blocks mean some operations are more computationally and bandwidth intensive, meaning you will get fewer IOPS and less sustained throughput without paying more money. In addition, there is always going to be a bit more latency when going over the network versus a SAS RAID card.
As with all things in life, it's a tradeoff. If you look at other large providers' (GCE, DO at least) network storage offering, you'll also see a significant performance regression from local SSD.
LOL => A 80GB EBS SSD snapshot takes more than 1 hour.
Subsequent snapshots are incremental and will be less slow.
> multi server/rack redundancy with EC
You can move drive manually after you stop an instance, if that's what you call redundancy.
> ability to scale up with provisioned IOPS
Nope. You need to unmount, clone the existing EBS volume to a new EBS volume with different specs, and mount the new volume. You can't change anything on the fly.
The last time we had to change a 1TB drive from a database, we tried it on a smaller volume... then we announced that it would be a 14-hours-of-downtime-maintenance-operations (if we do it this way) :D
Depends how much they've been written to since last snapshot. Heavy writes and it can be just as slow again.
So network-attached storage for Lightsail is upside for AWS, but all downside for the customer.
Many competitors just use local storage, which comes with its own serious downsides for the company and customer. DigitalOcean just recently launched its Volumes service, but it's very limited compared to EBS, and not nearly as fast as its local SSDs.
EBS is generally fine but I would really enjoy the option to have ~40GB local SSDs for caching (but I suppose you can always grab an r3/r4 and cache in memory if that's your bag).
The best cloud I/O perf I've seen, bar none, comes from Joyent's Triton containers. Beats even DO by 3-4x. Beyond that you need to go bare-metal.
