Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Behind the scenes of Amazon EBS innovation and operational excellence (STG210)

Summary

Cami Novella-Kuhlin, director of product management, and John Hayden, director of engineering for EBS, discuss the evolution of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) over 15 years.
EBS is a high-scale distributed system providing persistent block storage for EC2, with features like snapshots and data resilience.
The talk covers the history of EBS, its scaling challenges, architectural evolution, feature set expansion, and team culture.
EBS has grown to handle 100 trillion IOs and move 13 exabytes of data daily, necessitating continuous architectural innovation to avoid bottlenecks.
Key milestones include the transition from HDDs to SSDs, the introduction of provisioned IOPS with IO1 volumes, and the launch of IO2 volumes with five nines durability.
The Nitro system and SRD protocol have been instrumental in improving EBS performance, reducing tail latencies, and increasing throughput.
Operational excellence is emphasized as critical for innovation, with a focus on measuring everything, ownership, and continuous improvement.
The talk concludes with insights on balancing operational excellence with innovation and the importance of rethinking architectural risks as services scale.

EBS's journey reflects the broader trend of cloud services evolving to meet increasing customer demands for performance, reliability, and scalability.
The transition from HDDs to SSDs and the introduction of provisioned IOPS were pivotal in addressing customer needs for consistent and predictable performance.
The Nitro system and SRD protocol highlight AWS's commitment to leveraging in-house innovations to enhance service offerings.
AWS's approach to operational excellence, which involves meticulous measurement, ownership, and iterative improvement, is a model for managing large-scale distributed systems.
The concept of "no edge case" at scale underscores the importance of designing systems that can handle rare events, as they become inevitable with growth.
AWS's culture of reevaluating and adapting architectures to mitigate risks and improve service is a key factor in their ability to innovate and maintain customer trust.
The talk suggests that investing in operational excellence can create a virtuous cycle that enables more rapid innovation and growth, challenging the notion that operations and innovation are mutually exclusive.