The article posts a table of latency distributions, but the latencies are simulated based on the assumption that latencies are lognormal. I would be interested to read the article comparing the simulation to actual measurements.

The assumption that latencies are lognormal is a useful approximation but not really true. In reality you will see a lot of multi-modality (e.g. cache hits vs misses, internal timeouts). Requests for the same key can have correlated latency.

I think the distribution he uses is pretty close to the paper he links "Exploiting Cloud Object Storage for High-Performance Analytics" https://www.durner.dev/app/media/papers/anyblob-vldb23.pdf