Cloud makes provisioning more servers quicker because you are paying someone to basically have a bunch of servers ready to go right away with an API call instea

Cloud makes provisioning more servers quicker because you are paying someone to basically have a bunch of servers ready to go right away with an API call instead of a phone call, maintained by a team that isn’t yours, with economies of scale working for the provider. Cloud does not do anything else. None of these latency/speed problems are cloud-specific. If you have on-premise servers and you are storing your data on network-attached storage, you have the exact same problems (and also the same advantages). Unfortunately the gap between local and network storage is wide. You win some, you lose some.