The Morning Paper

MARCH 3, 2020

It takes you through the thinking processes and engineering practices behind the design of a key part of the control plane for AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS): the Physalia database that stores configuration information. For Physalia, and for AWS more generally, the guiding principle is minimise the blast radius. NSDI’20.

Database 106

Database AWS Network Design 106

The Netflix TechBlog

FEBRUARY 9, 2021

The homepage needs to load in a reasonable amount of time, even in poor network conditions. Server-generated assets, since client-side generation would require the retrieval of many individual images, which would increase latency and time-to-render. We can leverage high performance VMs in AWS to generate the assets.

Engineering 165

Engineering Storage Latency Entertainment 165

Brendan Gregg

JULY 4, 2021

AWS Graviton2); for memory with the arrival of DDR5 and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) on-processor; for storage including new uses for 3D Xpoint as a 3D NAND accelerator; for networking with the rise of QUIC and eXpress Data Path (XDP); and so on. Ford, et al., “TCP

Performance 52

Performance Latency Hardware Storage 52

Brendan Gregg

FEBRUARY 28, 2023

My personal opinion is that I don't see a widespread need for more capacity given horizontal scaling and servers that can already exceed 1 Tbyte of DRAM; bandwidth is also helpful, but I'd be concerned about the increased latency for adding a hop to more memory. Ford, et al., “TCP

Performance 52

Performance Latency Cache Virtualization 52

All Things Distributed

JULY 13, 2010

Customers with complex computational workloads such as tightly coupled, parallel processes, or with applications that are very sensitive to network performance, can now achieve the same high compute and networking performance provided by custom-built infrastructure while benefiting from the elasticity, flexibility and cost advantages of Amazon EC2.

Cloud 118

Cloud AWS Automotive Latency 118

VoltDB

JUNE 1, 2017

It was – like the hypothetical movie I describe above – more than a little bit odd, as you could leave a session discussing ever more abstract layers of virtualization and walk into one where they emphasized the critical importance of pinning a network interface to a specific VM for optimal performance.

Hardware 56

Hardware Latency Virtualization Cloud 56

The Morning Paper

MAY 28, 2019

We don’t talk about energy as often as we probably should on this blog, but it’s certainly true that our data centres and various IT systems consume an awful lot of it. The goal is to produce a low-energy hardware classifier for embedded applications doing local processing of sensor data. Introducing race logic. Performance evaluation.

Energy 52

Energy Hardware Efficiency Architecture 52

VoltDB

JUNE 1, 2017

It was – like the hypothetical movie I describe above – more than a little bit odd, as you could leave a session discussing ever more abstract layers of virtualization and walk into one where they emphasized the critical importance of pinning a network interface to a specific VM for optimal performance.

Hardware 40

Hardware Latency Virtualization Cloud 40

Percona

APRIL 17, 2023

The CFQ works well for many general use cases but lacks latency guarantees. The deadline excels at latency-sensitive use cases ( like databases ), and noop is closer to no schedule at all. Embedding further simplifies database operations, reduces network overhead, and boosts read and query performance.

Best Practices 52

Best Practices Design Tuning Database 52

Dotcom-Montior

OCTOBER 6, 2021

trying to reduce the amount of manual work and ensuring all the components (infrastructure/hardware, middleware, software, etc.) One minute an SRE might be provisioning storage in AWS, the next minute an SRE might have to talk to customers or go write some Python code for a new project. What are Some Common SRE Responsibilities?

Engineering 67

Engineering DevOps Monitoring Google 67

Adrian Cockcroft

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

This discussion focuses on hardware, software and operational failure modes. Collecting some critical metrics at one second intervals, with a total observability latency of ten seconds or less matches the human attention span much better. This is why most AWS regions have three availability zones.

Latency 52

Latency Engineering Systems Hardware 52

Adrian Cockcroft

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

This discussion focuses on hardware, software and operational failure modes. Collecting some critical metrics at one second intervals, with a total observability latency of ten seconds or less matches the human attention span much better. This is why most AWS regions have three availability zones.

Latency 53

Latency Engineering Systems Hardware 53

Sutter's Mill

JUNE 21, 2012

Now welcome to the hardware jungle. One of the slides I omitted to shorten this version of the talk highlighted that there are actually two issues when you go from “Disjoint (tightly coupled)” to “Disjoint (loosely coupled)”: reliability and latency , and both are important. (I — The free lunch is over.

Latency 40

Latency Transportation Hardware Education 40

Brendan Gregg

SEPTEMBER 5, 2017

Here's some output from my zfsdist tool, in bcc/BPF, which measures ZFS latency as a histogram on Linux: # zfsdist. Tracing ZFS operation latency. At my employer we sometimes use SR-IOV for direct network interface access, and NVMe for direct disk access. Hit Ctrl-C to end. ^C x series.

Virtualization 76

Virtualization AWS Engineering Hardware 76

All Things Distributed

APRIL 4, 2017

Today, I am very excited to announce our plans to open a new AWS Region in the Nordics! The new region will give Nordic-based businesses, government organisations, non-profits, and global companies with customers in the Nordics, the ability to leverage the AWS technology infrastructure from data centers in Sweden.

AWS 116

AWS Airlines Latency Games 116

Dynatrace

AUGUST 5, 2019

In this role, I am leading a global team that works closely with our strategic partners such as AWS, Microsoft, Google, Pivotal, Red Hat and others. While most of our cloud & platform partners have their own dependency analysis tooling, most of them focus on basic dependency detection based on network connection analysis between hosts.

Cloud 31

Cloud Traffic Database Network 31

Smashing Magazine

JANUARY 11, 2021

Networking, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 OCSP stapling, EV/DV certificates, packaging, IPv6, QUIC, HTTP/3. If you don’t have a device at hand, emulate mobile experience on desktop by testing on a throttled 3G network (e.g. Estimated Input Latency tells us if we are hitting that threshold, and ideally, it should be below 50ms. 300ms RTT, 1.6

Performance 145

Performance Cache Media Metrics 145

Smashing Magazine

JANUARY 6, 2020

If you don’t have a device at hand, emulate mobile experience on desktop by testing on a throttled 3G network (e.g. To make the performance impact more visible, you could even introduce 2G Tuesdays or set up a throttled 3G/4G network in your office for faster testing. 300ms RTT, 1.6 Mbps down, 0.8

Performance 145

Performance Cache Network Metrics 145

All Things Distributed

DECEMBER 12, 2018

In April 2017, Amazon Web Services announced that it would launch a new AWS infrastructure region Region in Sweden. Today, I'm happy to announce that the AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region, our 20th Region globally, is now generally available for use by customers. Public sector.

AWS 124

AWS Cloud Games Serverless 124

Smashing Magazine

JANUARY 7, 2019

If you don’t have a device at hand, emulate mobile experience on desktop by testing on a throttled network (e.g. To make the performance impact more visible, you could even introduce 2G Tuesdays or set up a throttled 3G network in your office for faster testing. 150ms RTT, 1.5 Mbps down, 0.7 Mbps up) with a throttled CPU (5× slowdown).

Performance 103

Performance Cache Metrics Network 103

All Things Distributed

MARCH 11, 2016

The epoch of AWS is the launch of Amazon S3 on March 14, 2006, now almost 10 years ago. Given that AWS is a pioneer in building and operating these services world-wide, these lessons have been of crucial importance to our business. This is a given, whether you are using the highest quality hardware or lowest cost components.

AWS 144

AWS Hardware Retail Virtualization 144

All Things Distributed

JULY 20, 2015

The pool of resources, at this time, is the CPU, memory, and networking resources of Amazon EC2 instances as partitioned by containers. networks ports, memory, CPU, etc). To be robust and scalable, this key/value store needs to be distributed for durability and availability, to protect against network partitions or hardware failures.

Latency 166

Latency Architecture AWS Open Source 166

All Things Distributed

NOVEMBER 15, 2010

For example, the most fundamental abstraction trade-off has always been latency versus throughput. Modern CPUs strongly favor lower latency of operations with clock cycles in the nanoseconds and we have built general purpose software architectures that can exploit these low latencies very well. General Purpose GPU programming.

AWS 136

AWS Latency Programming Architecture 136