Who would have guessed having local, low latency, high iops drives would be better than VM using iSCSI-attached drive for storage, right? ;-)

Tbf iscsi and especially it’s future demise - nvmeof can be made quite fast. The problem that in gp2/3, gce-pd cases it’s probably not some native storage but another layer of software-based distributed store which makes stuff slow/expensive

But also less prone to single drive failures. And easily auto expanding storage sizes. Everything is a trade off.

I actually don't suggest that people get off the cloud. My gripe is with the devil may care attitude toward costs. I am still very cost-conscious about it (even those most business aren't). Newer engineers just don't think of it as a factor. Push a button, get a load balancer. It all adds up.

Your AWS bill is directly proportional to the number of developers, because they all spin up cloud toys they are fond of.

Except people end up running systems on them that have their own replication built in like kafka, cockroach etc. In all those cases you’d be better off with your node just hard crashing if disk goes bad rather than the latency penalty that inevitably follows the failover

As a young person I agree with you.