How do the amazon web services work?

Question

What information have you been able to gather regarding how do the amazon web services work?

• What hardware do they use
• What web server
• What Operating System
• What storage for AWS
• What virtualization software for EC2/EBS
• What software for they distributed firewall for EC2
• Physical location of their data centers.

I like their services very much and use them a ton at work... just out of curiosity. If you know/heard/read and want to tell, if you saw something online and want to provide a link, very appreciated.

Solution 1

This might be interesting: http://highscalability.com/amazon-architecture

Solution 2

While this question can't be answered in precision, I'll try to shed some light on internal workings that Amazon announced publicly. Below are some details for commonly used c and m instance types, as well as recently released bare metal instances. Also, this can be starting point for further research as specifics are far behind single answer on SO.

Compute Hardware.

If you want to take a deep dive I suggest going through all previous generations and current generation instance types. Underlying hardware can be find on this pages.

• Bare metal instances

Bare metal instances became GA in April 2018. One of the details - I3.metal instances are powered by 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon processors, offering 36 hyper-threaded cores (72 logical processors), 512 GiB of memory, and 15.2 TB of NVMe SSD-backed instance storage. More info

• Compute optimized instances (C)

• Latest c5 (late 2017) generation instances are using 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Platinum 8000-series. More info here

• c4 (generation is using optimized for ec2 processor Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (code name Haswell) processor. More info here

• c3 generation introduced SSD instance storage and used 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2680v2. More info here

• General purpose ec2 instances (M)

  1. m5 instances are based on Custom Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8175M series processors running at 2.5 GHz. Most likely running on Nitro hypervisor mentioned below. More info

  2. m4's were released back in 2015 and have custom Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 Haswell processor optimized specifically for EC2. More info

  3. m3's were released in 2012 and for some who remember carried some price reduction with them, making use of AWS use more appealing to audience looking through budgeting lenses. They are/were using Intel Xeon E5-2670 processor and started using SSD instance memory.

What web server

I've seen couple of times error pages from their WebUI (AWS Console) rendered via Tomcat, so I would guess this is console server.

What virtualization software for EC2/EBS

AWS recently announced (with c5 instance type announcement) that they will start using KVM based hypervisor. Presentation linked here outlines hypervisor history very good (table below taken from same page)

Physical location of data centers

This is not (and due security reasons should not) be disclosed publicly. There are always rumors / some sources about it (look at related Quora thread

Comments

[Eight-Bit Guru]

Not, strictly speaking, a programming question.

[John Hunt]

10 years old, almost certainly irrelevant now.

[tarn]

@JohnHunt Did you read it? The lessons learned are still surprisingly relevant.