AWS re:Invent 2014: AWS Innovation at Scale with James Hamilton (SPOT301)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as an authoritative overview of AWS infrastructure, including what AZs and regions really mean.
What it is
James Hamilton, AWS VP and distinguished engineer, gives an insider view of the innovations behind the AWS cloud at re:Invent 2014. He covers custom hardware, networking, regions and availability zones, and infrastructure at scale.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2014 to 2020.
What Hacker News said
Recommends MrZipf · 2015-02 · on “Introducing “6-pack”: the first open hardware modular switch”
This looks great. They also have the advantage that James Hamilton mentioned AMZ got from building their own hardware - the get to do a cleansheet s/w design and not have to support all the gazillion options that Cisco does. The talk was on HN a little while ago, worth watching: [this video] The scale at FB means they're probably saving hundreds of millions doing this.
Recommends dastbe · 2016-09 · on “An AWS Region is coming to France”
James Hamilton gives a good talk that goes over networking (and more). This is it from reinvent 2014. [this video]
Cites nandemo · 2014-11 · on “A peek at the massive scale of AWS”
> This suggests to me that running distributed databases in multiple AZ's has almost no latency penalty (e.g. you won't even paying eventual consistency / replication lag taxes that you might think are a danger). Yes, Hamilton points that out in his talk: [this video]
Cites Twirrim · 2015-11 · on “Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0”
Around about here in the talk: [this video] James Hamilton talks precisely what the definitions of AZs and regions are :)
Cites idunno246 · 2016-09 · on “New P2 Instance Type for Amazon EC2 – Up to 16 GPUs”
[this video] I think this is the right talk by him, but there's one where he implies some differences. For instance, that because they can promise exact temperature ranges they can clock them differently. My guess is same fab, just binned differently, or maybe different packaging.
Cites ignoramous · 2020-04 · on “Now Open – AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region”
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), [this video] [1] Tuesday Night Live (2016), [LINK] [2] Operation of the AWS Global Network (2019), [LINK] [3] Foundations of AWS Infrastructure (2018), [LINK] [4] Exploring the AWS Global Network (2018), [LINK]