But why then would the article mention that they had problems with reliability? That seems ... odd; what have you experienced in your working with these (assuming you have)?
These disks aren't typically meant for database server usage. They're fine for consumers and even stuff like webservers, but the amount of data discord moves around on the daily means that they are bound to make some disks fail pretty quickly.
The normal course of action for this is usually to have a raid array over all your nvme disks, but since google just migrates your VM to a machine that has good disks, doing that is useless.
Really this whole article is "we are going to keep using google cloud despite their storage options being unfit for our purpose and here's how".
> Really this whole article is "we are going to keep using google cloud despite their storage options being unfit for our purpose and here's how".
And that's called hacking. Welcome to Hacker News. Discord's engineers are gods among mortals for squeezing this kind of latency and reliability out of something Google intended for consumers. Yes I know the way you're supposed to do something like this is to use something like Cloud BigTable where you probably have to call a salesperson and pay $20,000 before you're even allowed to try the thing. But Discord just ignored the enterprisey solution and took what they needed from the consumer tools instead. It reminds me of how early Google used to build data centers out of cheap personal computers.
Consider it is not an unheard of experience to join the workforce, use a preconfigured macbook with precisely 1 SSD, and spend one's career building on SaaS platforms like AWS Lambda.
In such a world, perhaps those who remember there's a world of flexibility and power within the OS could be seen as welding some supernatural power.
More charitably, the GP could be suggesting that Discord should have gone to a lower layer in the stack by using their own hardware, which would let them choose a more appropriate storage substrate instead of layering on top of an inappropriate one.
