Not mentioned yet is that nearly all object stores (S3, GCS, etc.) are pretty awful for small, random reads and writes. For workloads like rendering, the render

Not mentioned yet is that nearly all object stores (S3, GCS, etc.) are pretty awful for small, random reads and writes. For workloads like rendering, the renderer is often reading a small tile of a texture (an EXR or tiff) with about 32x32 pixels (so anywhere between 1 KiB and 16 KiB depending on precision and compression). Object stores on the other hand are tuned for big files and so often work in 1 to 4 MiB chunks at best. Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine.