“We thought that just dropping SSDs in to replace HDDs would solve almost all of our problems, and it certainly did address the problems that came from the mechanics of hard drives. But what surprised us was that the system didn’t improve nearly as much as we had hoped and noisy neighbors weren’t automatically fixed.”
EBS launched in 2008 on shared hard drives with latency in the tens of milliseconds. Now it runs over 140 trillion operations a day. The 2012 Provisioned IOPS launch topped out at 1,000 IOPS, and the team had only rudimentary telemetry to know what was broken. Every EC2 customer of that era was a noisy neighbor to someone, and paid for the privilege.