I'll leave this here: https://www.slideshare.net/iammutex/what-every-data-programmer-needs-to-know-about-disks https://www.slideshare.net/iammutex/what-every-da

I'll leave this here: https://www.slideshare.net/iammutex/what-every-data-programmer-needs-to-know-about-disks https://www.slideshare.net/iammutex/what-every-data-programm... https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/the-data-sessions/9781449315054/oreillyvideos886685.html https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/the-data-sess... TL;DR Disk IO is pretty much a black box in virtualized environments. All the cool stuff you can do with disks (and memory, and tmpfs) to improve performance seems worth hosting your own hardware. Personally I'd just read everything Ted Dziuba wrote and rethink how much "Ops" is dying. http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/archives.html http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/archives.html Maybe it's just being replaced by a bunch of code to fix problems caused by "cloud" hosting performance bottlenecks. I'm not saying this is necessarily bad, but you should be aware that you're probably trading time managing and picking hardware that suits your needs for additional coding time.