AWS re:Invent 2018: Powering Next-Gen EC2 Instances: Deep Dive into the Nitro System (CMP303-R1)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as the primary source on how Nitro offloads I/O to dedicated hardware and keeps management tasks off guest CPUs.
What it is
An AWS re:Invent 2018 session diving into the Nitro system, a set of hardware offload and security building blocks behind next-generation EC2 instances. It covers the design and architecture and how Nitro enables new instance types.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2019 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends _msw_ · 2019-01 · on “Twitter migrates data to Google Cloud”
Hi! I'm from the EC2 engineering team. This is a super challenging problem for general purpose virtualization stacks. EC2 has been working to avoid any guest VM interruptions. With the Nitro hypervisor, there are no management tasks that share CPUs with guest workloads. See more here, including data from a real customer with real-time requirements running on EC2 under the Nitro hypervisor: [this video]
Cites richardowright · 2019-02 · on “Hackers Can Slip Invisible Malware into 'Bare Metal' Cloud Computers”
Full post from eclypsium [LINK] . Also I assume aws baremetal servers are not vulnerable due to the nitro security card ( [this video] ).
Cites rektide · 2021-11 · on “AWS Nitro SSD – High Performance Storage for Your I/O-Intensive Applications”
Hi Jeff! Eeeeeek! I'd love to know so much more about the Nitro acceleration. All these accelerated fabrics are so interesting. * What does the Nitro accelerator look like to the host? . Does the Nitro accelerator present as NVMe devices to the OS host, or is there a more custom thing it presents as? Does the Nitro accelerator use SR-IOV to or something else to present as many different PCIe adapters, per-drive PCIe, or a single PCIe device, or no PCIe devices at all, something else entirely (and if so what)? Are there custom virt-io drivers powering the VMs? How much change has gone into these interfaces in the newest iterations, or have these interface channels remained stable? * What is t
Cites walterbell · 2022-05 · on “ZFS Without a Server Using the Nvidia BlueField-2 DPU”
DPUs/SmartNICs are a partial industry response to AWS Nitro (based on Annapurna acquisition) which performs I/O (network/storage) virtualization. Nvidia DPU is based on Mellanox acquisition AMD DPU is based on Pensado acquisition Intel has an in-house DPU There was a 2018 talk on AWS Nitro, [this video] Cadence summary: [LINK] James Hamilton summary: [LINK] The founder of Annapurna-Nitro is now at [LINK] , which has created the NVMEoF (NVME over Fabric, i.e. Ethernet or FiberChannel) standard. This is implemented via a software driver or hardware accelerator. Both DPUs and NVMEoF can be viewed as an attempt to standardize "composable data center" architectures pioneered by AWS Nitro. > but this i
Cites transpute · 2025-06 · on “Barrelfish OS Architecture Overview (2013) [pdf]”
A longer history would start with IBM mainframes. More recently, IBM Ultravisor shipped in OpenPower firmware, mediating KVM VMs, [LINK] & [LINK] 2018 video by Ian Pratt covers Xen, uXen and AX (2005-2015), [LINK] . Citrix acquired XenSource. Pratt left to work at Bromium, acquired by HP (which previously acquired BIOS company from Bromium co-founder). The former CTO of XenSource co-founded Qumranet (KVM), acquired by RedHat. AWS began with Xen, then migrated to a subset of KVM. Nitro used Arm hardware to virtualize I/O (storage, network) paths, leaving KVM responsible for x86 CPU and memory virtualization, [this video] & [LINK] . Parallels could be drawn to the Apple T2 enclave (Arm) coprocessor