Did S3 really become that much faster over the years? I was optimizing a cache that worked on top of HDFS and cloud FSes at some point few years ago, and I remember making slides to present the improvements. For HDFS I had this complex slide that tried to show cache is actually achieving some fractional improvement at some point. For the unnamed cloud FS, I just had to make a 2-bar chart that looked like the cloud FS is giving you a middle finger sideways... A really tall bar for the time it took to read data off the cloud FS. A really small bar with cache.