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AWS Nitro System

perspectives.mvdirona.com

161 pointsingve8 comments

Not exactly related to the article.. But, James's blog is a gold mine for anyone who hasn't been there before. He is one of the guys who is making AWS possible behind the scenes. There are also some cool youtube videos if you search around [1, 2], where he goes into the technical details of the inner working of AWS, and his deep technical knowledge and passion shine.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj7Ting6Ckk

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS-FI4eTods

Imo, James Hamilton is the single most important person in AWS engineering. That's saying a lot since AWS isn't short of some amazing talent right now, esp at the top rungs of various engineering orgs.

I think he's responsible for the very fundamental underpinnings of what AWS does at the infrastructure-level, without which the service owners at AWS would be utterly lost, I feel.

Jame's infectious passion, his religious dedication to his craft... plus there's just so much wisdom in one person that it's ridiculous.

Which eng orgs in AWS are the most impressive in your opinion?

Utility computing

I remember reading about the concept of utility computing in the late 90's, and thinking it was such an amazing concept but seems like one of those that was "always 5 years away". But then it grew up around us slowly enough I barely noticed it as something revolutionary, yet fast enough that today's landscape of infrastructure build outs looks vastly different than just a few years ago.

Awesome videos, thank you for linking.

James should find a better host for his blog, the loading time is abysmal. Presumably because of the comments section. (Which is actually interesting!)

These talks are really informative. Thanks for sharing the links!

OT: If any GCP/Azure folks here, could you point me to similar resources re their network, storage and data center design.

Google is famous for publishing a lot of material every year.

A couple of related publications you might be interested in:

1. The Datacenter as a computer: https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub41606

2. The SRE book: https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/toc/

A couple of dated presentations:

1. Jeff Dean on building software systems at Google (2010) at Stanford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=modXC5IWTJI

2. Notes by James Hamilton on a talk by Jeff Dean on Google Datacenters in 2008: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/06/jeff-dean-on-googl...

Microsoft Research pretty much work on bleeding edge tech, as well and publish about some of their research pretty regularly. Here's a staring point to help anyone interested find relevant publications: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/research-area/syste...

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