20 years ago, we figured when we had this level of computing power available to us at these costs, we would stop worrying about performance. But it hasn't happened at the "cloud" layer; when you're trying to perform at scale, every additional little quirky feature some existing solution may provide may be the thing that breaks your use of it, and the diversity of ways that cloud services can function is quite amazing. From 20,000 feet they may all look the same but down on the ground even two "disk bound" services may have radically different properties and requisite solutions.

You don't know enough to judge whether this was good, necessary, or an effective use of time.