Highlights from Peter DeSantis Keynote at re:Invent 2020
Resilience between AWS and other cloud providers
AWS design its infrastructure in a resilient way, comparing to its competitors.
The fundamental concept Regions (physical location in the world made out of multiple Availability Zones)
AWS definition of Availability zone — “one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, housed in separate facilities”.
Google Cloud Platform definition of zone as “a zone usually has power, cooling, networking, and control planes that are isolated from other zones”
References:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-overview/global-infrastructure.html
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones#choosing_a_region_and_zone
AWS Hardware announcements in 2020
On 2020, AWS announced the 4th generation of its Nitro architecture, which re-architected the traditional hypervisor crucial components (such as network, storage and even security) from the hypervisor itself, to dedicated set of hardware-based chips and software components.
Examples of Amazon EC2 instances supported by the Nitro architecture, announced on 2020:
Amazon EC2 C5a, Amazon EC2 C5ad, Amazon EC2 G4dn
On 2020, AWS also announced the 2nd generation of its Graviton processors (Graviton2), based on the 64-bit Arm architecture.
Examples on Amazon EC2 instances announced on 2020, based on Graviton2:
Amazon EC2 T4g, Amazon EC2 M6g, Amazon EC2 M6gd, Amazon EC2 C6gd, Amazon EC2 R6gd and even Amazon RDS instances based on Graviton2 — M6g, R6g and C6g.
The Graviton2 processors provides up to 40% better price/performance, as compared to 1st generation of the Graviton processors, enhanced performance for video encoding and hardware acceleration for compression workloads.
Each core of the AWS Graviton2 processor is a single-threaded vCPU, compared to Intel and AMD based EC2 instances where 2 vCPU (2 threads) equals single physical core. This provides more core and more power for running workloads, as shown during the keynote:
