Archive For The “Services” Category
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….
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…
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…
In November of last year, AWS announced the first ARM-based AWS instance type (AWS Designed Processor: Graviton). For me this was a very big deal because I’ve been talking about ARM based servers for more than a decade, believing that massive client volumes fund the R&D stream that feeds most server-side innovation. In our industry,…
At SIGMOD 2019 in Amsterdam last month it was announced that the Amazon Aurora service has been awarded the 2019 SIGMOD Systems Award. From the awards committee: The SIGMOD Systems Award is awarded to an individual or set of individuals to recognize the development of a software or hardware system whose technical contribqutions have had…
Back in late 2008 and early 2009, I had a few projects underway. One was investigating the impact of high temperatures on the longevity and fault rates in servers. We know what it costs to keep a data center cool, but what I wanted to know is what it would cost if we didn’t keep…
On Monday night I described AWS Graviton , the general-purpose AWS-developed server processor with 64-bit Arm that powers the EC2 A1 instance family. The five members of the A1 instance family target scale-out workloads such as web servers, caching fleets, and development workloads. This is the first general-purpose processor that has been designed, developed, and…
This is an exciting day and one I’ve been looking forward to for more than a decade. As many of you know, the gestation time for a new innovation at AWS can incredibly short. Some of our most important services went from good ideas to successful, heavily-used services in only months. But, custom silicon is…
Many years ago, Amazon chose to use Oracle database products to run the business. At the time it was a perfectly rational decision and, back then, many customers made the same choice and some took a different path. I’ve worked on both DB2 and SQL Server over the years so I know well the arguments on…
Last week Fortune asked Mark Hurd, Oracle co-CEO, how Oracle was going to compete in cloud computing when their capital spending came in at $1.7B whereas the aggregate spending of the three cloud players was $31B. Essentially the question was, if you assume the big three are spending roughly equally, how can $1.7B compete with…