Archive For The “Services” Category

Airline Overbooking isn’t Evil

Airline Overbooking isn’t Evil

Airline overbooking isn’t evil. In fact, if done properly, it’s good for airlines, good for customers, and good for the environment. Sold seats are clearly good for airlines and their shareholders. High utilization is good for customers because it reduces seat costs for airlines which normally operate at single digit profit margins. In the consumer…

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At Scale, Rare Events aren’t Rare

At Scale, Rare Events aren’t Rare

I’m a connoisseur of failure. I love reading about engineering failures of all forms and, unsurprisingly, I’m particularly interested in data center faults. It’s not that I delight in engineering failures. My interest is driven by believing that the more faults we all understand, the more likely we can engineer systems that don’t suffer from…

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AWS re:Invent 2016

AWS re:Invent 2016

Last week we held the 5th annual AWS re:Invent conference. This conference is my favorite opportunity to get into more detail with customers and partners and to learn more about some of the incredible innovations AWS customers are producing. The first year, I was impressed by the conference scale. Back in 2012 it still felt like…

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A Decade of Innovation

A Decade of Innovation

March 14, 2006 was the beginning of a new era in computing. That was the day that Amazon Web Services released the Simple Storage Service (S3). Technically, Simple Queuing Services was released earlier but it was the release of S3 that really lit the fire under cloud computing. I remember that day well. At the…

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Volkswagen Emissions Fiasco

Volkswagen Emissions Fiasco

I’m an avid reader of engineering disasters since one of my primary roles in my day job is to avoid them. And, away from work, we are taking a small boat around the world with only two people on board and that too needs to be done with care where an engineering or operational mistake…

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VPC NAT gateways : transactional uniqueness at scale

VPC NAT gateways : transactional uniqueness at scale

This is a guest blog post on Perspectives from Colm MacCarthaigh, a senior engineer on the Amazon Web Services team that designed and built the new VPC Network Address Translation Gateway service that just went live yesterday. Over the last 25 years, Network Address Translation (NAT) has become almost ubiquitous in networks of any size. The…

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Greenpeace, Renewable Energy, and Data Centers

Greenpeace, Renewable Energy, and Data Centers

Greenpeace has focused on many issues of great import over the years. I like whales, don’t like shark finning, and it’s hard to be a huge fan of testing nuclear weapons on South Pacific islands. Much good work has been done and continues to be done. Over the past three to five years, Greenpeace has…

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The Return to the Cloud

The Return to the Cloud

Zynga is often in the news because gaming is hot and Zynga has been, and continues to be, a successful gaming company. What’s different here is the story isn’t about gaming nor is it really about Zynga itself. The San Francisco gaming house with a public valuation of $2.5B was an earlier adopter of cloud…

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AWS re:Invent Conference

AWS re:Invent Conference

In the Amazon Web Services world, this has always been a busy time of the year. Busy, because, although we aim for a fairly even pace of new service announcements and new feature releases all year, invariably, somewhat more happens towards the end of the year than early on. And, busy, because the annual AWS…

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Challenges in Designing at Scale: Formal Methods in Building Robust Distributed Systems

We all know that when designing and operating applications at scale, it is persistent state management that brings the most difficult challenges. Delivering state-free applications has always been (fairly) easy. But most interesting commercial and consumer applications need to manage persistent state. Advertising needs to be delivered, customer activity needs to be tracked, and products…

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Energy Efficiency of Cloud Computing

Most agree that cloud computing is inherently more efficient that on premise computing in each of several dimensions. Last November, I went after two of the easiest to argue gains: utilization and the ability to sell excess capacity (Datacenter Renewable Power Done Right): Cloud computing is a fundamentally more efficiently way to operate compute infrastructure….

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The Cloud: Fastest Industry Transition Ever

It’s not often I’m enthused about spending time in Las Vegas but this year’s AWS re:Invent conference was a good reason to be there. It’s exciting getting a chance to meet with customers who have committed their business to the cloud or are wrestling with that decision. The pace of growth since last years was…

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Datacenter Renewable Power Done Right

Datacenter Renewable Power Done Right

Facebook Iowa Data Center In 2007, the EPA released a study on datacenter power consumption at the request of the US Congress (EPA Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Efficiency). The report estimated that the power consumption of datacenters represented about 1.5% of the US Energy Budget in 2005 and this number would…

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Counting Servers is Hard

At the Microsoft World-Wide Partners Conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced that “We have something over a million servers in our data center infrastructure. Google is bigger than we are. Amazon is a little bit smaller. You get Yahoo! and Facebook, and then everybody else is 100,000 units probably or less.” That’s a surprising data…

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Customer Trust

In the cloud there is nothing more important than customer trust. Without customer trust, a cloud business can’t succeed. When you are taking care of someone else’s assets, you have to treat those assets as more important than your own. Security has to be rock solid and absolutely unassailable. Data loss or data corruption has…

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Redshift: Data Warehousing at Scale in the Cloud

I’ve worked in or near the database engine world for more than 25 years. And, ironically, every company I’ve ever worked at has been working on a massive-scale, parallel, clustered RDBMS system. The earliest variant was IBM DB2 Parallel Edition released in the mid-90s. It’s now called the Database Partitioning Feature. Massive, multi-node parallelism is…

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