Compute innovation for any application, anywhere (CMP215)

Key Takeaways

Amazon EC2 Innovation Journey

  • Over the past decade, AWS has made significant strides in hardware and software innovation to enable new cloud computing capabilities.
  • The AWS Nitro System, a custom hardware-based virtualization platform, has been a key driver of EC2's leadership in security, performance, and reliability.
  • The Nitro System has evolved through 5 generations, with the latest Nitro V6 offering 400 Gbps of network bandwidth and unlocking new instance types like the C8gn.
  • AWS has also designed its own Nitro SSD to address the challenges of virtualizing modern SSDs at scale, resulting in significant improvements in latency and variability.
  • The I7ie instance type, powered by the 3rd-gen Nitro SSD, delivers 120TB of low-latency NVMe storage and up to 65% better real-time storage performance.

Enhancing Security with Custom Silicon

  • Security has been a top priority for AWS from the beginning, leading to the development of custom silicon solutions like the Nitro System.
  • The Nitro System provides robust security features, including cryptographic identity generation and end-to-end attestation with Graviton 4 CPUs.
  • Graviton 4 CPUs also introduce hardware-based security capabilities like pointer authentication and branch target identification to protect against attacks.

Expanding Compute Options

  • AWS continues to expand its compute offerings to support a wide range of workloads, from high-memory instances like the U7inh (16 sockets, 32TB memory) to GPU-optimized instances like the P5en with low-latency Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA).
  • The P5en instances leverage EFA v3 to provide 35% better latency for tightly coupled ML applications that rely on low-latency communication.
  • AWS has also unveiled the Trainium2 and Trainium3 chips, custom-built for high-performance training and inference of large language models, with significant performance and efficiency improvements.
  • The Trainium2-powered N2 instances and the upcoming Trainium3 chips are designed to support the exponential growth in compute required for modern AI/ML workloads.

Fostering Customer Innovation

  • AWS has enabled customers like Heroku, CircleCI, Nasdaq, and Liberty Mutual to run workloads on EC2 that were previously considered impossible or extremely difficult to virtualize.
  • The combination of services like ECS, Lambda, and EKS has helped customers like Heroku focus on building applications that drive their business, by offloading infrastructure management to AWS.
  • Innovations like EKS AutoMode and EKS Hybrid Nodes further simplify Kubernetes operations, enabling customers to focus on innovation.

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