I liked the part about them manually retrofitting an SSD in every EBS unit in 2013. That looks a lot like a Samsung SATA SSD:

https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/images/mo-manual-ssd.pn...

I think we got SSDs installed in blades from Dell well before that, but I may be misremembering.

I/O performance was a big thing in like 2010/2011/2012. We went from spinning HDs to Flash memory.

I remember experimenting with these raw Flash-based devices, no error/wear level handling at all. Insanity, but we were all desperate for that insane I/O performance bump from spinning rust to silicon.