Post

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.

The latest edition of compsci classic "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" covers the architecture of Nitro and the AWS Graviton hardware. Neat.

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.

Graviton 4 also provided a coherent link between cores, to enable 192 vCPU cores, but this introduced new latency paths. Graviton 5 improves that, doubling the number of cores, and increasing the L3 cache by 5.3x. These are now available in preview, as part of M9g EC2 instances.

Brown is back, talking through the history of AWS Lambda, initially conceived of in 2013. A couple of years ago, the Lambda and EC2 teams were brought together. It's that coming together that led to the release this week of AWS Lambda Managed Instances.

Lambda Managed Instances allow you to launch Lambdas on EC2 nodes provisioned to the spec of your choosing. You still don't manage the servers yourself. "Serverless is the absence of server management", Brown says, answering that question once and for all.

We're onto AI Elasticity now. AWS built Bedrock using a traditional load balancer / webservice design. Those learnings led to a better understanding of how to build inference platforms. This led to Project Mantle, which underpins many of Bedrock's models today. This is how they offer latency tiers.