re:Invent

AWS' Andy Troutman on component reusability

What we do first is we build very simple foundational building block services … we will build the simplest possible service that you could think of.

The next thing we do is we encourage an open marketplace within Amazon so individual teams can use, optimize, and extend these basic services.

We use our individual [teams] as a test lab to experiment on better ways to do things, and when we find something that seems to be working, we look for ways to [grow it and use it more] broadly.

Then, on the value of open repos:

We want this ecosystem of learning from each other because we are all leveraging each other’s web services. We have these hardened contracts, it’s incredibly high leverage to be able to go and see how someone else used a web service quickly, and rip a piece of their code—steal it—and make use of it for your own purposes.

Andy’s slides are at Slideshare.

Drivers and “standards”

A contact at Intel spoke rather openly that AWS was consuming about 50% of all Intel CPUs. Ignoring what this means for Intel’s business prospects, consider that it means that AWS is effectively the dominant server ~~manufacturer~~designer. And, now that they’re building their own components, they’re the biggest developer of drivers for server hardware. » about 400 words

Hardware virtualization has moved to hardware

One of my takeaways from AWS’ bare metal announcements at re:Invent this week is that the compute, storage, and network aspects of hardware virtualization are now optimized and accelerated in hardware. AWS has moved beyond the limitations that constrained VM performance, and the work they’ve done applies both to their bare metal hardware and their latest VM instance types.

» about 900 words