> Reading/writing SMALL files are SUPER slow on things like S3
My experience was the opposite. Small files work acceptably quickly, the cost can't be beat, and the reliability probably beats out anything else I've seen. We saw latencies of ~50ms to write out small files. Slower than an SSD, yes, but not really that slow.
You do have to make sure you're not doing things like re-establishing the connection to get that, though. If you have to do a TLS handshake… it won't be fast. Also, in you're in Python, boto's API encourages, IMO, people to call `get_bucket`, which will do an existence check on the bucket (and thus, double the latency due to the extra round-trip); usually, you have out-of-band knowledge that the bucket will exist, and can skip the check. (If you're wrong, the subsequent object GET/PUT will error anyways.)
My experience was the opposite. Small files work acceptably quickly, the cost can't be beat, and the reliability probably beats out anything else I've seen. We saw latencies of ~50ms to write out small files. Slower than an SSD, yes, but not really that slow.
You do have to make sure you're not doing things like re-establishing the connection to get that, though. If you have to do a TLS handshake… it won't be fast. Also, in you're in Python, boto's API encourages, IMO, people to call `get_bucket`, which will do an existence check on the bucket (and thus, double the latency due to the extra round-trip); usually, you have out-of-band knowledge that the bucket will exist, and can skip the check. (If you're wrong, the subsequent object GET/PUT will error anyways.)