Amazon Web Services
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2016–2023
1:33:27 · 133K views · Nov 30, 2016
James Hamilton's Tuesday Night Live keynote at AWS re:Invent 2016, touring AWS infrastructure at scale including networking, power and custom silicon. It also features NASA JPL's Tom Soderstrom.
HN treats Hamilton's annual talks as the best window into how AWS regions and hardware are actually built.
7 comments from Hacker News
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] this video
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] this 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), this 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]
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: this video
Watch this video from 2016 by James Hamilton at AWS Re:Invent this video It'll tell you lots about how AWS is built