- What kind of SSD?
- What kind of "core"?
- How much are you over-provisioned on the physical hardware?
People are treating cloud resources like they're commodity, but they are not (cloud service providers make it very hard to compare apples to apples). You can have first-class PCIe SSDs on RAID 10 underneath that virtualized storage, or you can have consumer-grade non-RAIDed SATA, but it's all "40GB SSD" to you, the customer.
vCPUs are even worse. Buy a 20-core Xeon box, split it across 60 tenants, each with 2 vCPUs each, or via 40 tenants with 1 vCPU?
t2 instances notoriously throttle way down to 10% if your workload is too consistent. The full performance is quite good from the 2.40 GHz E2676 v3, but at 10% it's worse than a Raspberry Pi. And this will always hit you at the worst time (when under load).
As for the SSDs, they're just GP2 storage, which is an order of magnitude slower than DO and nearly 2 orders of magnitude slower than Joyent Triton.
So AWS is providing a seriously inferior product here, but it's under the AWS umbrella and peers with the rest of their services. The question is: will the target market care about any of AWS's other services enough to make the inferior $/perf worthwhile, and will they integrate easily enough for the average developer to use them?
vCPUs are even worse. Buy a 20-core Xeon box, split it across 60 tenants, each with 2 vCPUs each, or via 40 tenants with 1 vCPU?