Moving to NVMe Cloud Hosting

If you’ve already heard about NVMe cloud hosting before, congratulations! You’re among a small minority of future-thinking developers who are already looking for the next big thing in cloud hosting.

NVMe disks are pretty new and definitely haven’t gone mainstream yet. Getting one for your personal computer is pretty cost-prohibitive still, and that’s what makes the cloud so compelling—you can, pretty cheaply, get a piece of an NVMe drive in a high-speed data centre for a much smaller investment.

What’s NVMe?

In short, It’s like the move to SSDs that happened years ago, but now on hyperdrive. We’re excited to see what our users do with it.

NVMe stands for NVM Express: NVM stands for non-volatile memory, which refers to memory that retains its stored data even after losing and regaining power. All the common disk storage technology, such as spinning disks and solid-state drives, are non-volatile memory.

In contrast, volatile memory is that which loses its data when power is cut. Your machine’s RAM is a great example.

Why it’s faster and by how much

As I mentioned earlier, the Express interface is a vast improvement over previous SAS/SATA interfaces. A good SSD drive might be able to read 550 megabytes of data per second (sequentially) and write 520 megabytes per second, assuming it is connected to a fast SAS or SATA disk interface.

This same drive might be capable of 10,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) random read as well.

A good NVMe drive might deliver 3,000 megabytes per second (sequential) read/write and 600,000 IOPS (random read).