AWS re:Invent 2016: Tuesday Night Live with James Hamilton

The keynote by James Hamilton[1] is absolutely awesome. You can genuinely tell that James finds all this technology fascinating. He talks about fiber, networking, power, redundancy, scale all with utter enthusiasm. [1] [VIDEO]

Others have answered, but I think the general principle for a Region is that between the AZs you have less than 1ms latency, physical separation between the data centers, but they may still be in the same floodplain, be able to be hit by the same hurricane, etc. More info here if you want to see how regions are structured at a high level of detail: [VIDEO]

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), [LINK] [1] Tuesday Night Live (2016), [VIDEO] [2] Operation of the AWS Global Network (2019), [LINK] [3] Foundations of AWS Infrastructure (2018), [LINK] [4] Exploring the AWS Global Network (2018), [LINK]

Watch this video from 2016 by James Hamilton at AWS Re:Invent [VIDEO] It'll tell you lots about how AWS is built

Mark Russinovich gives a good talk most years on the internals of Azure and the systems that run it. [1] is an example. Look for talks from other years as well. Meta also publishes a number of papers/blogs/OSS projects on their engineering site [2] James Hamilton of AWS gives a talk most years on their infrastructure. Worth watching multiple years [3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]

Amazon announced they were doing network processing in hardware at Re:work last week [1]. Custom silicon, rather than the FPGA or ASICS they were using when they started the project in 2012. They tout not only the freed CPU resources, but lower latencies and increased security of isolating the networking from the CPUs running hosted VMs. [VIDEO]

James Hamilton talked about their commitment to 25GbE hardware at Reinvent in 2016. Fast forward to ~23m. [VIDEO]