I'm all for outsourcing hardware hosting ('cloud') to save costs and to allow for quick provisioning of new instances - but went you need raw power and in cases where it's inefficient to horizontally scale - the latest generation of PCIe NVMe SSDs are really very impressive and in a recent evaluation we performed of our storage - it was actually going to work out significantly cheaper to A) host our high speed storage ourselves and B) buy SSDs and do away with rotational drives.
Probably not. At all.
EBS is NOT harddisks inside a server. Comparing them to such is missing out on all the things that makes it a SERVICE and not disks you buy from Newegg/PCmall/<insert vendor here>. Yes there are disks you can buy to physically put in a server and they are super blazing fast. In fact AWS has those in their i2 instances and they get hundreds of thousands of IOPs as well.
This isn't even comparing apples to oranges, its apples to space monkeys.
Yes there is replication both to separate disk arrays AND seperate physical servers with live failover and load balancing - again nothing new here?
No we don't send out storage to other countries - in fact that would be illegal, and if we were to do so our clients would suffer as Australia's international peering is pretty woeful.
We also gain on-disk compression and encryption on a LUN by LUN basis as we require it, storage is automatically provisioned to new application instances, all the software is 100% open source and mature, we don't have to phone a large corporate that doesn't really care about us, we pass security audits because we can prove where things are and how they're configured.
By the way, none of this is your 'new egg' gear you referenced, we use Intel DC P3600/P3700 PCIe storage. Oh and as a bonus - there's no licensing or monthly invoices that need attention.
Is shared hosting / hardware outsourcing / cloud computing amazing - yes! Of course it is!
But you must remember it is their intentions to sell their product as the only right answer and to tell you what you should care about. In some cases it applies and in some it doesn't. The danger in jumping on the bandwagon and becoming an Amazon 'fanboy' (I'm really sorry for using that term - I hate it) is that you quickly become silod from external opperuntities and security / high vertical performance solutions.
If I was in a small team of devs working on launching a web app that's going to be targeted at an international audience, my growth is highly unpredictable, our future uncertain and our skill set focused on developing great software - I wouldn't think twice about using AWS/Rackspace etc...
But when you understand your environment well, when you have a limited budget, when you have a predicable customer base with strick security requirements and when you're pushing databases pretty hard - would I use AWS? No, it's not cost effective for us, nor is it legally (and perhaps morally) viable. Do we waste lots of time looking after our hardware? No! It's 2015 - hardware is easy.
The price premium of using AWS is high enough that it's trivial to afford leasing tons of excess capacity to handle failures and still save tons of money.
But by and large it's not really necessary - most hosting providers can provide rapidly provisioned managed servers or VPS's in the same data centres as their colo offerings these days, which provides an excellent fallback if we get into capacity issues, meaning that thanks to the existence of cloud services, the cost of running your own base load can be pushed down significantly (everything I deploy is deployed in VMs or containers, and sometimes containers in VMs (don't ask...), and whether they run on our hardware or on a cloud providers hardware is merely a configuration issue.
In fact I have a couple of Xen based VPSs we rented in New Zealand to serve a customer that's tied seamlessly into our UK based infrastructure because it's not somewhere we can justify operating our own setup.
AWS certainly is convenient, but it's also so expensive I'm charging my highest day rates ever for projects to help clients move off AWS these days. It's easy to justify high fees when people see how much they can save.
"Amazon EBS measures each I/O operation per second (that is 256 KB or smaller) as one IOPS"
No, not even close.
