🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Ah, a "comprehensive analysis." You've gotta love it when the academics finally get around to publishing what we were screaming about in sprint planning meetings eight years ago. "Uniform hardware scaling in the cloud is over." You don't say? I thought adding more floors to the Tower of Babel was going to make it touch the heavens. We were told it was a paradigm shift. Turns out, it was just a shift… to a different line item on the budget.

Let's break down this masterpiece of delayed realization, shall we?

So, CPU core counts "skyrocketed" by an order of magnitude. Fantastic. We got 448 cores in a box. It's like stuffing a dozen interns into a Honda Civic and calling it a "high-occupancy productivity vehicle." And the actual cost-performance gain? A whopping 3x. But wait, take away our special little in-house pet project, Graviton, and it's barely 2x. Two times. Over a decade where we were promised the moon. I remember the all-hands where they unveiled the roadmap for those massive core-count instances. The slides were glowing. The VPs were preening. The performance projections looked like a hockey stick. What they didn't show you was the slide from engineering showing that our own hypervisor couldn't even schedule threads efficiently past 64 cores without setting itself on fire. But the marketing number looked great, didn't it?

And the paper's "key open question" is a riot. "Where is the performance lost?" Oh, you sweet summer children. It’s lost in a decade of technical debt. It’s lost in a scheduler held together with duct tape and wishful thinking. It's lost in a virtualization layer so thick you need a map and a compass to find the physical hardware. They think the culprit is that "parallel programming remains hard." No, the culprit is that we sold a Ferrari chassis with a lawnmower engine inside and spent all our time polishing the hood ornament.

Then we get to memory. DRAM cost-performance has "effectively flatlined." You mean the thing we buy by the metric ton and mark up 400% isn't getting cheaper for the customer? Shocking. The only real gain was in 2016. That wasn't an innovation, that was a pricing correction we fought tooth and nail against until a competitor forced our hand. The new AI-driven price hikes are just a convenient excuse. What a happy little accident for the bottom line.

Of course, the network is the big hero. A 10x improvement! And it's only available on the "network-optimized" instances, powered by our proprietary Nitro cards. How wonderfully convenient. The one component that tethers you inextricably to our ecosystem, the one thing that makes our eye-wateringly expensive "disaggregated" services even remotely usable, is the one thing that got better. It's not a rising tide lifting all boats; it's us selling you a faster pipeline to our more expensive water reservoir because your local well ran dry.

But let's not get too excited, because then we get to my favorite chapter in this whole tragedy: NVMe. Oh, sweet, stagnant NVMe. This isn't just a failure; it's a work of art.

...the i3 [from 2016] still delivers the best I/O performance per dollar by nearly 2x.

Let that sink in. The best value for local high-speed storage is an instance family launched when Barack Obama was still president. We have launched thirty-five other families since then. Thirty. Five. And every single one is a step backward in cost-efficiency. This isn't stagnation; it's a deliberate, managed decline. Why? Because you can't sell "disaggregated storage" and S3 Express if the local drives are fast and cheap, can you? We didn't bury the bodies; we just built a more expensive mausoleum for them next door and called it "modern cloud architecture."

The paper speculates this "explains the accelerating push toward disaggregated storage." It doesn't explain the push; it is the push. It’s the business plan. Starve local performance to make the network-attached alternative look like a feast.

So the grand takeaway is that the future is "hardware/software codesign." I remember that buzzword. That's what we called it when we couldn't fix the core software, so we bolted on a custom ASIC to bypass the broken parts and called it an "accelerator." It’s not innovation, it’s a patch. A very, very expensive patch that comes with its own proprietary API and a whole new level of vendor lock-in.

They say Moore's Law is dead. No, it's not dead. It's just been kidnapped, held for ransom, and its services are now sold back to you one specialized, non-transferable API call at a time. Enjoy the "future of the cloud," everyone. It looks an awful lot like a mainframe.