This is down to several things:

- Latency - having your own local network, rather than sharing some larger datacenter network fabric, gives around of order of magnitude reduced latency

- Caches – right-sizing a deployment for the underlying hardware, and so actually allowing a modern CPU to do its job, makes a huge difference

- Disk IO – Dedicated NVMe access is _fast_.

And with it comes a whole bunch of other benefits:

- Auto-scalers becomes less important, partly because you have 10x the hardware for the same price, partly because everything runs 2x the speed anyway, and partly because you have a fixed pool of hardware. This makes the whole system more stable and easier to reason about.

- No more sweating the S3 costs. Put a 15TB NVMe drive in each server and run your own MinIO/Garage cluster (alongside your other workloads). We're doing about 20GiB/s sustained on a 10 node cluster, 50k API calls per second (on S3 that is $20-$250 _per second_ on API calls!).

- You get the same bill every month.

- UPDATE: more benefits - cheap fast storage, run huge Postgresql instances at minimal cost, less engineering time spend working around hardware limitations and cloud vagaries.

And, if chose to invest in the above, it all costs 10x less than AWS.

Pitch: If you don't want to do this yourself, then we'll do it for you for half the price of AWS (and we'll be your DevOps team too):

https://lithus.eu

Email: adam@ above domain

Yeah, maybe his detractors were on to something.

I haven't even started "The Road" because of its reputation. I have only read "Child of God" and wondered why someone might write about the worst among us. But then I'm not a fan of Quentin Tarantino as a filmmaker for the same reason.