It's just an artifact of network-attached storage. Many competitors just use local storage, which comes with its own serious downsides for the company and cust

It's just an artifact of network-attached storage. Many competitors just use local storage, which comes with its own serious downsides for the company and customer. DigitalOcean just recently launched its Volumes service, but it's very limited compared to EBS, and not nearly as fast as its local SSDs. EBS is generally fine but I would really enjoy the option to have ~40GB local SSDs for caching (but I suppose you can always grab an r3/r4 and cache in memory if that's your bag). The best cloud I/O perf I've seen, bar none, comes from Joyent's Triton containers. Beats even DO by 3-4x. Beyond that you need to go bare-metal.