There are effectively three tiers: managed storage services like S3 (object storage), EFS (NFS NAS), or FSX (clustered filesystem) where most of the decisions are made for you; the mid-level EBS (SAN) service; and storage-optimized instance types with local disks which you manage.
This custom SSD hardware family is what powers the EBS (cloud SAN) service, which allows you to pay for the performance level you need, where they give it both higher absolute performance and [now] better worst-case latency.
This announcement is saying that you can now get your own instances with the same performance characteristics for situations where you need better performance than a SAN can deliver and/or the robustness benefits of using per-node storage rather than a separate networked service.
The other part of this announcement is the implicit message it sends about the competition: they're telling everyone that their storage performance is more consistent than their competitors and increasing the number of areas where they can say they have an option which a competitor does not. Noting that this was driven by the EBS storage team is also a reminder that they have more people working on lower-level infrastructure problems than you likely do.
This custom SSD hardware family is what powers the EBS (cloud SAN) service, which allows you to pay for the performance level you need, where they give it both higher absolute performance and [now] better worst-case latency.
This announcement is saying that you can now get your own instances with the same performance characteristics for situations where you need better performance than a SAN can deliver and/or the robustness benefits of using per-node storage rather than a separate networked service.
The other part of this announcement is the implicit message it sends about the competition: they're telling everyone that their storage performance is more consistent than their competitors and increasing the number of areas where they can say they have an option which a competitor does not. Noting that this was driven by the EBS storage team is also a reminder that they have more people working on lower-level infrastructure problems than you likely do.