Comment by SomeHacker44

For databases, local storage beats SAN storage massively. I can get better performance and IOPS from an Intel NUC with a decent PCIe SSD than I can get from an AWS RDS instance that costs as much per month as the NUC did to buy. If I optimize a proper rack mount server for database I can get an insane amount and storage and performance compared to even a few months of RDS. Even a pair of 40 Gbps SAN links would not compare.