alt Hacker News> all the signals from the offline files in mere seconds
That sounds unlikely unless those machines had access to crazy disk I/O. A local RAID 5/10 with 8 drives would still take 30-50 minutes just to read that much data. Even with a mid-range SAN you still would have spent 15-25 minutes just reading data. This assumes 7.2K SAS/SATA since SSD/NVMe were not ubiquitous in 2015, but even with 2015-era SSDs you're still looking at half that much time spent reading.
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Your statement about SSD availability and performance does not fit with my personal recollections of history. Smoking fast SSDs were completely vanilla items you could order from anyone in 2015. For example, the Intel DC P35/6/700 series. Each of these was as good as 25 HDDs for linear reads and more like 5000 HDDs for random reads. The U.2 specification for putting SSDs in boxes was formalized in 2011. Outside of the mass market, cloud builders had private SSD designs long before 2015.
Lots of EBS volumes mounted via 25GBPs or higher network, positioned carefully onto a single rack where possible and carefully tuned network/ip/os for both clients and servers. It is not feasible in most deployments as this would not have scaled to real production loads (RAID configurations requiring redundancy alone would slow you down, not to mention costs of using that many EBS volumes on extra high network/IO/provisioned IOPS nodes). This was only meant to prove what was possible in AWS at the time.