/me aerospike employee here - we did a live demo of running aerospike server on AWS EC2 during the fifth elephant last weekend at bangalore. The demo had 1M TPS and latency for 80/20 load (80% read, 20% write) was <1ms for >99.8% of queries.
This demo was done on 4 r3.4xlarge nodes - We did earlier runs on r3.2xl as well with similar results.
"Anyway, the code is free to install, it's easy enough to validate the speed claims"
So why don't you do so and come back with your own results that can at least pretend to be neutral instead of spreading empty hype around here?