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DeSantis tells the story of how original EC2 performance was subject to jitter, as a result of the virtualisation mechanism. To solve this, they built AWS Nitro, the hardware virtualisation platform that underpins the whole AWS cloud.

Dave Brown, VP, AWS Compute & ML Services takes the stage to talk about Graviton, Amazon's custom ARM-based chip which delivers excellent price/performance compute on AWS.

As well as custom silicon, Graviton chips are cooled in a custom way too - the lid of the chip is removed, and the heat sink applied directly. This improves cooling efficiency and reduces power usage.

Each Graviton generation is improved based on data about how the previous one performed on real workloads. L2 cache misses in Graviton 3 were having a real impact on performance, so Graviton 4 doubled the size of the L2 cache per core, added more cores, and increased the size of the L3 cache too.