from Hacker News

AWS Nitro SSD – High Performance Storage for Your I/O-Intensive Applications

by Trisell on 11/30/21, 7:15 PM with 44 comments

• by rektide on 11/30/21, 8:06 PM

  > Today I would like to tell you about the AWS Nitro SSD.

  A bit light on technical details but very fun, very exciting. Kind of sad that such amazing work is no longer quite so public, is no longer something that say Intel is going to talk up in endless details with a product launch. A huge amount of the work & innovation here is extremely specific, extremely private- all this Elastic Fabric Adapter related stuff is advanced systems engineering, close integration of systems, that's Amazon's & Amazon's alone.

  Anyhow. This article pairs very well with the "Scaling Kafka at Honeycomb"[1], which I found to be a delightful read on adapting & evolving a big huge workload to ever-improving AWS hardware.

  [1] https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/scaling-kafka-observability-pi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29396319 (38 minutes ago, 13 points)

• by ahepp on 11/30/21, 10:11 PM

  One question I have is, I thought the cloud was supposed to abstract this kind of stuff away? Shouldn’t cloud services be sold in the “solution domain” rather than by picking the backing technology behind your tool?

  For example, why not have a file/object/whatever storage service; and a price matrix that lets you select key metrics like latency, throughput, and variability of either?

  I don’t particularly care if my ultra fast ultra low latency is derived from SSDs, spinning rust, RAM, l2 cache, or acoustic ripples. But I’m not super in tune with cloud services to begin with.

• by StratusBen on 12/1/21, 2:04 AM

  Related: I just updated https://ec2instances.info/ so that it now includes the new instances types so you can compare them on a price and resource basis.

• by ksec on 11/30/21, 8:37 PM

  >The second generation of AWS Nitro SSDs were designed to avoid latency spikes and deliver great I/O performance on real-world workloads. Our benchmarks show instances that use the AWS Nitro SSDs, such as the new Im4gn and Is4gen, deliver 75% lower latency variability than I3 instances, giving you more consistent performance.

  Tl;dr: They now have custom SSD firmware that avoid latency spikes.

• by AtlasBarfed on 11/30/21, 11:42 PM

  The issue with all AWS storage is that storage bandwidth eats your network bandwidth. And there are not-great documented multi-level throttles and bottlenecks involved in that.

  Especially in the "Up to X per second" networking instances, which is basically all of them except the huge ones.

  The activation of throttles is NOT well exposed in metrics, nor is bursting amount or detecting if bursting is occurring.

  It is all somewhat shady IMO, with AWS trying to hide problems with their platform, or hide that you're getting charged in lots of sneaky ways.

• by Donovan2 on 12/1/21, 2:26 AM

  Hi Jeff, Is this AWS custom SSD based on their own SSD CTRL and FW not commercial SSD??

• by ABeeSea on 11/30/21, 11:04 PM

  >We also took advantage of our database expertise and built a very sophisticated, power-fail-safe journal-based database into the SSD firmware.

  Assuming this means something similar to QLDB, did they put a centralized blockchain in the firmware? Pretty cool.