I have a suspicion that many of them are not running on AWS, since they'd like to remove as much cloud/network latency as possible.

My parents company is an example - they need that kind of performance in remote northern canada where connecting to AWS would be a couple bytes every couple seconds with a while of a latency.

The server goes travelling instead, along with the people to use it

How can you drive by mentioning this without mentioning your company name?!?!? Our firm uses smallish sizes of AWS EFS storage and we're highly annoyed by the throughput limitations.

The limit work I've done is in geophysics, and AWS is a non-starter for data collection and analysis in the bush.

If you can wait a few weeks to upload all the data to AWS, why are you going to care about moving the processing speed from a month to half a month?

The high speed stuff is in dedicated hardware that can travel to where it's needed, whether that's in a base station or with the surveyors

I’d be interested in the company name too (feel free to dm if it’s stealth or something). I’d add that gp3 and other cloud pds implement ec under the hood and as such have very high durability and zero maintenance issues overhead (since they’re managed). And yeah you trade dogshit performance for that privilege

If your application has to go to disk to fetch something it's already accepted that it'll take time. Things that need to be really fast go to RAM or cache.

For everything else you're already getting into niches.

What's your startup? I'd be interested to see the cost. Persistence gotchas, encryption / security.