All Things Distributed: Recent Episodes
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Zak van der Merwe has spent his entire career at AWS building control planes. First for EC2 and now for DSQL. On the surface, the control plane looks quite boring: it records what should exist and reconciles that with what actually does. Nobody leaves school dreaming of building one, but Zak will be the first to tell you that if you like solving hard problems in distributed systems, there are few better places to be. It’s where many of those hard problems converge, and where the decisions you make determine whether a service survives its own growth.
Today, we're releasing the second season of the Now Go Build documentary series. Five episodes featuring technology leaders from around the world solving the hardest problems in healthcare and education.
What made the Quick desktop team successful is the same thing that has always produced the best work I've seen at Amazon: a small group of people who trusted each other, owned the problem end-to-end, and acted on their conviction.
Andy Warfield writes about the hard-won lessons dealing with data friction that lead to S3 Files
Over the past decade, Byron's team has proven the correctness of our authorization engine, our cryptographic implementations, and our virtualization layer. Now they're taking those same techniques and applying them to agentic systems.
Today, I’m honored to introduce you to the latest cohort of Now Go Build CTO Fellows. Individuals from around the world with diverse backgrounds (engineering, the humanities, business, healthcare, entrepreneurship, law) that have found their calling at the intersection of technology and education.
Fear is actually a pretty good signal that you are pushing into the unknown, that real growth doesn’t happen without a bit of that associated discomfort, and that it’s worth becoming aware when it happens. Aware enough to consider actually leaning into it.
We’ve caught glimpses of a future that values autonomy, empathy, and individual expertise. Where interdisciplinary cooperation influences discovery and creation at an unrelenting pace. In the coming year, we will begin the transition into a new era of AI in the human loop, not the other way around. This cycle will create massive opportunities to solve problems that truly matter.
While many of us chase the latest tech trends, innovative builders in Sub-Saharan Africa are leveraging a nearly 30-year-old messaging protocol to process hundreds of billions in transactions annually, reminding us that the best technology isn't always the shiniest, it's what actually solves customer problems.
AWS Senior Principal Engineers, Niko Matsakis and Marc Bowes, take us inside Aurora DSQL's development: scaling write operations without two-phase commit, overcoming garbage collection hurdles, and embracing Rust for both data and control planes.
The vision was to build the Star Trek computer. 10 years ago that was an ambitious goal. We’ve come a long way since then - from basic voice commands to much more conversational interfaces with Alexa+.
From simple object storage to sophisticated table management, builders have always shaped S3's evolution. Andy Warfield discusses why making complex systems simple remains our north star at AWS.
Here are a few of my favourite books to help you think like a fox - from sci-fi classics to the importance of doing nothing at all (it's a Dutch thing).
We've entered an era of unprecedented societal challenges and rapid technological advancements. Harnessing technology for good has become both an ethical imperative and a profitable endeavor. These are the areas where I see technology shaping society in 2025 and beyond—and it all starts with mission-driven work.
The Frugal Architect returns with expanded content, featuring stories from AWS customers optimizing their architectures for cost and sustainability.
Earlier this year, I announced the Now Go Build CTO Fellowship. A program designed to empower leaders from nonprofits and social impact organizations solving hard human problems. Today, I'm excited to introduce the first two cohorts, focusing on Disaster Management and Climate Resilience.
On AWS Lambda's 10th anniversary, I'm publishing the internal PR/FAQ that helped launch this groundbreaking service. This document provides insight into the customer problems we observed in the early 2010s and our vision for serverless computing. Readers will find annotations throughout, offering a glimpse into how our long-term thinking has influenced Lambda's evolution over the past decade.
Builders are at the heart of AWS. Most recently, I visited Malaysia, the location of the newest AWS Region, our 34th globally, and home to a rapidly evolving technology sector, where businesses of all sizes are proving that solving hard human problems can be a profitable business model.
Marc Olson, a long-time Amazonian, discusses the evolution of EBS, highlighting hard-won lessons in queueing theory, the importance of comprehensive instrumentation, and the value of incrementalism versus radical changes. It's an insightful look at how one of AWS’s foundational services has evolved to meet the needs of our customers.
After a few code reviews from Rustaceans at Amazon and a bit of polishing, I'm ready to share the Distill CLI. An open-source tool written in Rust for summarizing meetings and other media that uses AWS services, such as S3, Transcribe, and Bedrock.
My team and I set out to build a simple note taking aide, which transcribes and summarizes our meetings using Bedrock. Today, we’re making the proof of concept available to everyone.
An inside look at the Tallaght District Heating Scheme, where Heat Works is using recycled heat from an AWS data center to warm a community in Dublin, Ireland.
After a busy conference season, I've taken some time to catch up on reading and make a dent in the pile of books on my nightstand. Here's what I've started, finished, and picked up since re:Invent.
The coming years will be filled with innovation in areas designed to democratize access to technology and help us keep up with the increasing pace of every-day life -- and it starts with Generative AI.
The Builders' Library gathers the expertise of Amazon's most experience builders in one place. One article that really got me thinking was Colm MacCárthaigh's "Reliability, constant work, and a good cup of coffee" which is about an anti-fragility pattern that he developed for building simple, more robust, and cost-effective systems.
It is time to celebrate EC2-Classic, which defined early cloud computing, and which is finally retiring.
Three distinct perspectives on scale that come along with building and operating a storage system the size of S3.
As we are about to start the planning meetings for 2024 at AWS, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I take notes.
Building evolvable software systems is a strategy, not a religion. And revisiting your architectures with an open mind is a must.
For the season finale of Now Go Build, I traveled to Arizona, to see first-hand how autonomous trucking has the potential to revolutionize the global supply chain.
Developer tools are one area where generative AI is already having a tangible impact on productivity and speed, and it's the reason I'm excited about Amazon CodeWhisperer.
To learn more about large language models (LLMs), foundation models, and other advances in ML, I sat with two of Amazon’s distinguished scientists, Sudipta Sengupta and Dan Roth.
The VP of database, analytics and machine learning services at AWS, Swami Sivasubramanian, walks me through the broad landscape of generative AI, what we’re doing at Amazon to make large language and foundation models more accessible, and how custom silicon can help to bring down costs, speed up training, and increase energy efficiency for our customers.
Australia is home to a flourishing startup scene. It's flush with companies focused on improving healthcare outcomes, not only for people in Australia, but everywhere in the world. Cloud technologies are helping to accelerate both research and innovation in this space, and it all starts with the brain.
As we find ourselves spending more time talking with and through machines than we do face-to-face, the popularity of conversational AI and large language models show that there is an appetite for interfaces that feel more like conversations with people. However, what's still missing is the connection that's established with visual and non-verbal cues. The folks at Soul Machines believe that autonomously animated Digital People are the answer.
Innovation is borderless. Great ideas (and of course, great engineering) aren’t bound by geography or the lines on a map. Today, we launch the new AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region, expanding our footprint in Australia, and bringing AWS cloud services closer to companies like Omniscient Neurotechnology, a brain mapping startup that has the potential to revolutionise neurosurgery and treatments for mental health conditions.
As access to advanced technology becomes even more ubiquitous—as every facet of life becomes data that we can analyze—we will start to see a torrent of innovation, and this will proliferate in 2023.
Today, I am publishing the Distributed Computing Manifesto, a canonical document from the early days of Amazon that transformed the architecture of Amazon's ecommerce platform. It highlights the challenges we were facing at the end of the 20th century, and hints at where we were headed.
Diving into Automated Reasoning and Formal Verification with Dr. Byron Cook in this new video series for those Curious about new technologies
Diving into Quantum computing with Prof. John Preskill in this new video series for those Curious about new technologies
AWS ada untuk Indonesia - Starting today the new AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region is now open!
2022 will be an exciting year for technology, with it pushing all of us, and our planet, forward in the proces
The AWS Robotics Startup Accelerator aims to help robotics startups adopt and use AWS to boost their robotics development
The design of Amazon MemoryDB for Redis, a strongly-consistent, Redis-compatible, in-memory database service for ultra-fast performance