Where Are Amazon’s Data Centers? – The Atlantic

2 Comments

1. December 7, 2016 at 12:14 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Custom silicon, 9PB storage boxes, and 25Gb Ethernet – just another day in AWS hardware
   Turns out printing money requires a buttload of compute muscle
   http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/30/aws_hardware/

   AWS says it has moved into building its own silicon to help deliver the throughput for its massive cloud service.

   The profitable side of the Amazon empire says it has started using a custom-designed Annapurna ASIC chip to help control the networking activity – both physical and SDN – in its AWS servers. This is freeing up the CPUs on its hundreds of thousands of servers to focus on compute tasks.

   The custom chips also power a custom AWS network architecture that uses 25Gb Ethernet, a format Amazon believes is actually more scalable and efficient than the 10Gb and 40Gb Ethernet standards commonly used.

   James Hamilton, Amazon VP and distinguished engineer, said at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas this week that the chips add another level to the flexibility that allows Amazon to optimize all of its data centers specifically for the task of hosting AWS cloud instances. It also allows Amazon to take a different approach to networking that he says reflects a larger industry trend of going away from the traditional closed router box.

   “If you look at where the networking world is, it is sort of where the server world was 20 years ago,” Hamilton offered. “As soon as you chop up these vertical stacks and you have companies competing and working together, great things start to happen.”

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2. September 1, 2018 at 10:41 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Amazon Web Services’ secret weapon: Its custom-made hardware and network
   https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-web-services-secret-weapon-custom-made-hardware-network/

   AWS’s data centers, in 16 regions worldwide, are linked by a 100-Gb private network controlled exclusively by AWS, with no interconnection sites administered by other companies. “It’s many, many parallel 100-Gb links. There’s no way a single link will ever have any on impact on anyone in this room, because we have the capacity to survive a link failure. We engineer it that way. We’d be crazy not to.”

   “Every link is 100 gigs, absolutely everywhere,” Hamilton said. “This is a pretty important asset. When we started this, I was a little concerned, because it’s really, really, really expensive. The networking team is 100 percent committed that this is the right thing to do.”

   AWS uses short- and long-term leases, dark fiber lit under contract, and “in several cases we’re laying our own cable,” he said. “We’ll do whatever’s most cost-effective to get the resources we need.”

   Hamilton provided details, too, on Amazon’s data centers, which are usually surrounded by secrecy. It’s already known that each “availability zone” within a region contains at least one data center, but Hamilton added that most new data centers consume between 25 and 32 megawatts (MW) of power. That’s a fairly modest size: the most power-hungry data center in the world, China Telecom’s Inner Mongolia Information Park, consumes more than 150 MW on an ongoing basis.

   “You get really big gains in cost advantage as you get bigger, and we could easily build 250-MW facilities, but if it goes down, it’s not a good place to be,” he said. “So our take right now is that (25-32 MW) is about the right size facility. It costs us a tiny bit more to go down this path, but we think it’s the right thing for customers.”

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