Author Archive
The best way to hire great women is to have great women at the top of the company. IBM is a lot stronger for employing Pat Selinger for 29 years . She invented the relational database cost-based optimizer, a technology that sees continued use in relational database management systems today. But more than being a great technologist,…
Yesterday, I visited the Seagate Normandale Minnesota hard disk drive wafer fabrication facility. I’m super excited about HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) and the areal density it supports. Seagate’s Dave Anderson first introduced this to me technology nearly 20 years ago and it’s wonderful to see it delivered to market and the volumes ramping….
I helped kick off CIDR2024 yesterday with the keynote, Constraint Driven Innovation. My core thesis is that constraints force innovation. For example, it was slow hard disks that drove the invention of Write Ahead Logging. But constraints also block innovation. In memory databases first described in the 80s remained largely irrelevant for decades waiting for cost effective…
Just after joining Amazon Web Services in 2009, I met with Andrew Certain, at that time a senior engineer on the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) team, to get into the details on how EBS was implemented and what plans were looking forward. Andrew took me through the details of this remote block storage…
One of the Amazon Operations teams was hosting a conference for Product Managers in their organization and they asked a few of us to record a 1-minute video of what we each view as important attributes of a Product Panager. My take is below with a link to the video. The best Product Managers push…
High Performance Transactions System (HPTS) is a invitational conference held once every two years at the Asilomar Conference Center near Monterey California. My first HPTS was back in 1995 thanks to Pat Selinger. I loved it and attended each one up until 2012 when I started a 10 year around-the-world cruise in a small boat….
I introduced the 2022 National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering conference on September 21st. The National Academy of Engineering was founded in 1964 is part of The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The NAE operates under the same congressional act of incorporation that established the National Academy of Sciences, signed in 1863 by President…
Why would a cloud services company design and deploy custom semiconductors? It definitely wasn’t where I expected we would end up when I joined AWS in 2009 but it’s a decision that has just kept delivering for our customers. It’s been 10 years since those early ideas and, in reflecting on what the team has…
Today we’re making the AWS Graviton3 processor generally available in the AWS EC2 C7g Instances. Graviton3 and EC2 C7g Instance Type General Availability Video Graviton3 is the third generation of the AWS Graviton CPUs and it continues to raise the bar on performance. Graviton is one of our 4 semiconductor product lines here at AWS….
On August 25, 2006, we started the public beta of our first ever EC2 instance. Back then, it didn’t even have a name yet, but we latter dubbed it “m1.small.”. Our first customers were able to use the equivalent of 1.7 GHz Xeon processor, 1.75 GB of RAM, 160 GB of local disk and 250…
August 25th, 2021 marks the 15-year anniversary for EC2. Contemplating the anniversary has me thinking back to when I first got involved with cloud-hosted services. It was back in early 2005, about a year before S3 was announced, and I was at a different company working on a technical due diligence project for a corporate…
A couple of days back, Ganesh Venkataramanan, leader of the Tesla Dojo project, announced the Dojo machine learning training system. It’s an unusually network rich, power dense, and memory light design. I’ve summarized the architecture of the system below but I found three aspects of the system particularly interesting: Massive Network: Each D1 chip delivers…
The cloud helps organizations achieve unmatched resiliency at scale. This is a quick write-up I did on the AWS approach to resiliency: Reinventing Operational Resiliency. A talk I did at re:Invent focused on AWS infrastructure: Tuesday Night Live with James Hamilton. Graviton AWS Arm server announcement: M6g, C6g, and R6g EC2 instances powered by Graviton2.
I was recently in a super interesting discussion mostly focused on energy efficiency and, as part of the discussion, the claim was raised that Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley was right when he said that Energy was the number one challenge facing our planet. I’m a pretty big believer in energy efficiency and the importance of…
This is a simple little article that’s worth reading. I don’t agree with every point made but all 18 are interesting and every one of them leads to some introspection on how it compares with the situations I have come across over the years. It’s nice and concise with unusually good reading time to value…
Yesterday, Anandtech published what is, by far, the most detailed write-up on the AWS Graviton2 processor. In this article the author, Andrei Frumusanu, compared the Graviton2 with the AMD EPYC 7571 and the Intel Platinum 8259CL. Worth reading. From Anandtech: Amazon’s Arm-based Graviton2 Against AMD and Intel: Comparing Cloud Compute
The best way to hire great women is to have great women at the top of the company. IBM is a lot stronger for employing Pat Selinger for 29 years . She invented the relational database cost-based optimizer, a technology that sees continued use in relational database management systems today. But more than being a great technologist,…
Yesterday, I visited the Seagate Normandale Minnesota hard disk drive wafer fabrication facility. I’m super excited about HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) and the areal density it supports. Seagate’s Dave Anderson first introduced this to me technology nearly 20 years ago and it’s wonderful to see it delivered to market and the volumes ramping….
I helped kick off CIDR2024 yesterday with the keynote, Constraint Driven Innovation. My core thesis is that constraints force innovation. For example, it was slow hard disks that drove the invention of Write Ahead Logging. But constraints also block innovation. In memory databases first described in the 80s remained largely irrelevant for decades waiting for cost effective…
Just after joining Amazon Web Services in 2009, I met with Andrew Certain, at that time a senior engineer on the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) team, to get into the details on how EBS was implemented and what plans were looking forward. Andrew took me through the details of this remote block storage…
One of the Amazon Operations teams was hosting a conference for Product Managers in their organization and they asked a few of us to record a 1-minute video of what we each view as important attributes of a Product Panager. My take is below with a link to the video. The best Product Managers push…
High Performance Transactions System (HPTS) is a invitational conference held once every two years at the Asilomar Conference Center near Monterey California. My first HPTS was back in 1995 thanks to Pat Selinger. I loved it and attended each one up until 2012 when I started a 10 year around-the-world cruise in a small boat….
I introduced the 2022 National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering conference on September 21st. The National Academy of Engineering was founded in 1964 is part of The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The NAE operates under the same congressional act of incorporation that established the National Academy of Sciences, signed in 1863 by President…
Why would a cloud services company design and deploy custom semiconductors? It definitely wasn’t where I expected we would end up when I joined AWS in 2009 but it’s a decision that has just kept delivering for our customers. It’s been 10 years since those early ideas and, in reflecting on what the team has…
Today we’re making the AWS Graviton3 processor generally available in the AWS EC2 C7g Instances. Graviton3 and EC2 C7g Instance Type General Availability Video Graviton3 is the third generation of the AWS Graviton CPUs and it continues to raise the bar on performance. Graviton is one of our 4 semiconductor product lines here at AWS….
On August 25, 2006, we started the public beta of our first ever EC2 instance. Back then, it didn’t even have a name yet, but we latter dubbed it “m1.small.”. Our first customers were able to use the equivalent of 1.7 GHz Xeon processor, 1.75 GB of RAM, 160 GB of local disk and 250…
August 25th, 2021 marks the 15-year anniversary for EC2. Contemplating the anniversary has me thinking back to when I first got involved with cloud-hosted services. It was back in early 2005, about a year before S3 was announced, and I was at a different company working on a technical due diligence project for a corporate…
A couple of days back, Ganesh Venkataramanan, leader of the Tesla Dojo project, announced the Dojo machine learning training system. It’s an unusually network rich, power dense, and memory light design. I’ve summarized the architecture of the system below but I found three aspects of the system particularly interesting: Massive Network: Each D1 chip delivers…
The cloud helps organizations achieve unmatched resiliency at scale. This is a quick write-up I did on the AWS approach to resiliency: Reinventing Operational Resiliency. A talk I did at re:Invent focused on AWS infrastructure: Tuesday Night Live with James Hamilton. Graviton AWS Arm server announcement: M6g, C6g, and R6g EC2 instances powered by Graviton2.
I was recently in a super interesting discussion mostly focused on energy efficiency and, as part of the discussion, the claim was raised that Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley was right when he said that Energy was the number one challenge facing our planet. I’m a pretty big believer in energy efficiency and the importance of…
This is a simple little article that’s worth reading. I don’t agree with every point made but all 18 are interesting and every one of them leads to some introspection on how it compares with the situations I have come across over the years. It’s nice and concise with unusually good reading time to value…
Yesterday, Anandtech published what is, by far, the most detailed write-up on the AWS Graviton2 processor. In this article the author, Andrei Frumusanu, compared the Graviton2 with the AMD EPYC 7571 and the Intel Platinum 8259CL. Worth reading. From Anandtech: Amazon’s Arm-based Graviton2 Against AMD and Intel: Comparing Cloud Compute