5 HN users recommended this talk5 months2016–2023score 5.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN treats Hamilton's annual talks as the best window into how AWS regions and hardware are actually built.
James Hamilton's Tuesday Night Live keynote at AWS re:Invent 2016, touring AWS infrastructure at scale including networking, power and custom silicon. It also features NASA JPL's Tom Soderstrom.
“The keynote by James Hamilton[1] is absolutely awesome.” (HN, 2016)
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] [this video]
Enthusiastic James Hamilton tour of fiber, networking, power, and scale.
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: [this video]
Detailed overview of how AWS regions are structured.
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), [link] [1] Tuesday Night Live (2016), [this video] [2] Operation of the AWS Global Network (2019), [link] [3] Foundations of AWS Infrastructure (2018), [link] [4] Exploring the AWS Global Network (2018), [link]
One of several good overviews of AWS infrastructure.
Mark Russinovich gives a good talk most years on the internals of Azure and the systems that run it. [1] is an example. Look for talks from other years as well. Meta also publishes a number of papers/blogs/OSS projects on their engineering site [2] James Hamilton of AWS gives a talk most years on their infrastructure. Worth watching multiple years [3]. [1] [link] [2] [link] [3] [this video]
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. [this video]
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