Ha! On a side note (from the page you linked): > The high throughput and IOPS of the local disk makes the Lasv3-series VMs ideal for NoSQL stores such as Apach

Ha! On a side note (from the page you linked): > The high throughput and IOPS of the local disk makes the Lasv3-series VMs ideal for NoSQL stores such as Apache Cassandra and MongoDB. This is cringe-worthy. Cassandra is an abysmal quality product when it comes to performing I/O. It cannot saturate the system at all... I mean, for example, if you take old-reliable PostgreSQL or MySQL, then with a lot of effort you may get them to dedicate up to 30% CPU time to I/O. Where the reason for relatively low utilization (compared to direct writes to disk) is the need to synchronize that's not well-aligned with how the disk may want to deal with destaging. Cassandra is in a class of its own when it comes to I/O. You'd be happy to hit 2-3% CPU utilization in the same context where PostgreSQL would hit 30%. I have no idea what it's doing to cause such poor performance, but if I had to guess, some application logic... making some expensive calculations sequentially with I/O, or just waiting in mutexes... So, yeah... someone who wanted Cassandra to perform well would probably need that kind of a beefy machine :D But whether that's a sound advise -- I don't know.