Talks to Watch

AWS re:Invent 2014: AWS Innovation at Scale with James Hamilton (SPOT301)

70K views · Nov 18, 2014 · 47:51 · 2 HN recommenders · 6 mentions · discussed 2014–2020

James Hamilton, AWS VP and distinguished engineer, gives an insider view of the innovations behind the AWS cloud at re:Invent 2014. He covers custom hardware, networking, regions and availability zones, and infrastructure at scale.

Why Hacker News points people here: HN points to it as an authoritative overview of AWS infrastructure, including what AZs and regions really mean.

“James Hamilton gives a good talk that goes over networking (and more).”HN comment, 2016

What Hacker News said 6

RecommendsMrZipfFeb 2015

“The talk was on HN a little while ago, worth watching”

James Hamilton on building own hardware for clean-sheet software design.

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This looks great. They also have the advantage that James Hamilton mentioned AMZ got from building their own hardware - the get to do a cleansheet s/w design and not have to support all the gazillion options that Cisco does. The talk was on HN a little while ago, worth watching: this video The scale at FB means they're probably saving hundreds of millions doing this.

in “Introducing “6-pack”: the first open hardware modular switch” · view on HN
RecommendsdastbeSep 2016

“James Hamilton gives a good talk that goes over networking (and more).”

Hamilton covers AWS networking and infrastructure at scale.

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James Hamilton gives a good talk that goes over networking (and more). This is it from reinvent 2014. this video

in “An AWS Region is coming to France” · view on HN
Cites itnandemoNov 2014

“Yes, Hamilton points that out in his talk”

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> This suggests to me that running distributed databases in multiple AZ's has almost no latency penalty (e.g. you won't even paying eventual consistency / replication lag taxes that you might think are a danger). Yes, Hamilton points that out in his talk: this video

in “A peek at the massive scale of AWS” · view on HN
Cites itTwirrimNov 2015

“James Hamilton talks precisely what the definitions of AZs and regions are”

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Around about here in the talk: this video James Hamilton talks precisely what the definitions of AZs and regions are :)

Cites itidunno246Sep 2016

“I think this is the right talk by him”

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this video I think this is the right talk by him, but there's one where he implies some differences. For instance, that because they can promise exact temperature ranges they can clock them differently. My guess is same fab, just binned differently, or maybe different packaging.

in “New P2 Instance Type for Amazon EC2 – Up to 16 GPUs” · view on HN
Cites itignoramousApr 2020

“have given pretty good overview over the years of the AWS infrastructure.”

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James Hamilton [0][1] and others [2][3][4] have given pretty good overview over the years of the AWS infrastructure. [0] AWS Innovation at Scale (2014), this video [1] Tuesday Night Live (2016), link [2] Operation of the AWS Global Network (2019), link [3] Foundations of AWS Infrastructure (2018), link [4] Exploring the AWS Global Network (2018), link

in “Now Open – AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region” · view on HN