HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Watch this video from 2016 by James Hamilton at AWS Re:Invent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyOAjFNPAbA

It'll tell you lots about how AWS is built

James Hamilton [0][1] and others [2][3][4] have given pretty good overview over the years of the AWS infrastructure.

[0] AWS Innovation at Scale (2014), https://youtu.be/JIQETrFC_SQ

[1] Tuesday Night Live (2016), https://youtu.be/AyOAjFNPAbA

[2] Operation of the AWS Global Network (2019), https://youtu.be/UObQZ3R9_4c

[3] Foundations of AWS Infrastructure (2018), https://youtu.be/gH46jrFfiCc

[4] Exploring the AWS Global Network (2018), https://youtu.be/tPUl96EEFps

⬐ WoahNoun

He's also written about AWS infrastructure (and electricity infrastructure in general) on his blog. Fascinating stuff.

https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2017/04/how-many-data-cent...

https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2017/12/when-you-cant-affo...

https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2017/04/at-scale-rare-even...

https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2018/11/1227/

https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2019/02/aws-nitro-system/

James Hamilton talked about their commitment to 25GbE hardware at Reinvent in 2016. Fast forward to ~23m. https://youtu.be/AyOAjFNPAbA

Others have answered, but I think the general principle for a Region is that between the AZs you have less than 1ms latency, physical separation between the data centers, but they may still be in the same floodplain, be able to be hit by the same hurricane, etc.

More info here if you want to see how regions are structured at a high level of detail: https://youtu.be/AyOAjFNPAbA?t=15m21s

Amazon also do similar with their ENA [0]. James Hamilton talked about it in 2016 [1].

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/06/introduci...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyOAjFNPAbA&t=1820

⬐ bogomipz

The youtube link at the 35:00 mark says that the networking is an custom ASIC not an FPGA. "Amazon Annapurna ASIC" is what the slide says.

Are the ENA instances using something else?

⬐ douglasfshearer

First gen ENA (never publicly acknowledged AFAIK) was an FPGA, second gen is an ASIC.

Presentation including AWS custom router hardware from re:Invent 2016 https://youtu.be/AyOAjFNPAbA?t=23m15s

Amazon announced they were doing network processing in hardware at Re:work last week [1].

Custom silicon, rather than the FPGA or ASICS they were using when they started the project in 2012.

They tout not only the freed CPU resources, but lower latencies and increased security of isolating the networking from the CPUs running hosted VMs.

https://youtu.be/AyOAjFNPAbA?t=1822

The keynote by James Hamilton[1] is absolutely awesome. You can genuinely tell that James finds all this technology fascinating. He talks about fiber, networking, power, redundancy, scale all with utter enthusiasm.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyOAjFNPAbA

⬐ nodesocket

You can genuinely tell that James finds all this technology fascinating. He talks about fiber, networking, power, redundancy, scale all with utter enthusiasm.