AWS re:Invent 2017: How Netflix Tunes Amazon EC2 Instances for Performance (CMP325)

They use a lot of AWS services - not just virtual machines - First they use Ubuntu Linux - SES (Email) - ElasticSearch (AWS has their own managed version) - SQS (queueing system) - S3 (storage) -auto scaling Most of the optimization's they do are standard things at scale where they are tuning by measuring performance. this video and the slide deck from the presentation. link But that's even more of a reason to choose AWS, Netflix has open sourced dozens of tools specifically related to AWS. You get to take advantage of their tools and knowledge.

Well, most distributions choose saner defaults. For instance, RHEL/CentOS/AmazonLinux use noop io-scheduler by default for SSD based machines. Though, I get your point: for instance, the TCP keep-alive defaults aren't suitable for all kinds of workloads: link I guess, that's why performance tuning is an art form as it is workload dependant: this video

it was actually 5x, my bad, but here's the references: Original info being mentioned as a rumour (2016): link Slides for confirmation by Greeg (2017): link Talk (2017): this video More discussion: link Original tweet has been deleted, but I have a screenshot here slide 9: link