Thank you for joining us for the AWS re:Invent Infrastructure Keynote led by Alex Thompson, senior vice president of AWS Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, which took place on Thursday, December 10. AWS Chief Evangelist Charlotte Lee and Developer Advocates Ryan Smith and Lisa Hill were on hand to cover all the highlights, and you can check out their insights below.
Key Highlights
Ryan Smith 9:30 AM: That’s a wrap for the 2020 Infrastructure keynote! We appreciate you joining us, and we hope to see you at our final liveblog for re:Invent 2020, featuring Max’s keynote on Tuesday, December 15th!
Lisa Hill 9:23 AM: NextRoll reported a 50% reduction in total costs with their new EC2 instances; Graviton2 is definitely worth considering.
Ryan Smith 9:22 AM: My favorite moments? The conversation on chip design (makes me want to dig out my old hardware design textbook) and the updates on sustainability.
Lisa Hill 9:19 AM: Those Graviton2 benchmarks were impressive. There’s a lot of excitement from customers about ARM chips.
Ryan Smith 9:19 AM: Absolutely! I really enjoyed that segment. Hope everyone else did too!
Charlotte Lee 9:18 AM: This keynote was incredibly informative. I learned so much about our data center locations and energy sourcing, chip design, renewable energy initiatives, and how we minimize concrete and water usage.
Ryan Smith 9:17 AM: I just found out you can learn more about our sustainability efforts here.
Lisa Hill 9:16 AM: Even our largest data centers use roughly the same amount of water as 25 US households. We manage to recycle 96% of our wastewater. We watched a video showcasing how AWS is returning that water to agriculture.
Charlotte Lee 9:15 AM: So, this water flows through a cloud data center, gets routed into a canal, irrigates crops, some evaporates, and becomes — Cloud!!
Charlotte Lee 9:14 AM: It turns out we have an AWS Water Team…
Ryan Smith 9:12 AM: I have a book on the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge; it’s fascinating to learn that we now use less concrete for our data centers than what was used for the bridge.
Lisa Hill 9:12 AM: AWS is on track to operate entirely on renewable energy by 2025—five years ahead of our original 2030 target.
Charlotte Lee 9:10 AM: From the abstract to the extremely concrete!
Charlotte Lee 9:08 AM: Did he say 1.21 Gigawatts? Nope, 3.4 Gigawatts!
Charlotte Lee 9:07 AM: All these innovations are making AWS data centers much more energy efficient compared to typical enterprise data centers.
Ryan Smith 9:07 AM: Peter is now referring back to the earlier discussion about UPS systems and data center power, which have been optimized to save 35% of lost energy during power conversion.
Lisa Hill 9:05 AM: We’re back with Peter, who is updating us on sustainability.
Ryan Smith 9:05 AM: “The greenest energy is the energy we don’t use.”
Charlotte Lee 9:04 AM: The sign just went up on the Climate Pledge Arena last week—it’s practically in my backyard.
Lisa Hill 9:03 AM: Jerry from Snap mentioned that they wouldn’t have reached profitability without leveraging cloud services instead of building their own data centers.
Charlotte Lee 9:02 AM: That pesky speed of light comes into play again!
Lisa Hill 9:01 AM: Jerry Hunter from Snap says they were able to switch to Graviton2 instances with minimal code changes and immediately experience cost savings.
Lisa Hill 9:00 AM: Benchmarks are great, but customers are also reporting tangible benefits from Graviton2-based instances. Snap saw a 40% improvement in price performance.
Charlotte Lee 8:58 AM: It sounds like we’re about to delve into sustainability and renewable energy…
Lisa Hill 8:56 AM: Via video, we are joined by Jerry Hunter, SVP Engineering at Snap Inc.
Ryan Smith 8:56 AM: “The benchmarks that truly matter… are customer workloads.” I appreciate that perspective.
Charlotte Lee 8:55 AM: Peter emphasizes that scaling down to just one core is as crucial as scaling up to multiple cores.
Lisa Hill 8:54 AM: Graviton2 is effective not just for frontend workloads; it also excels in IO-intensive tasks. Peter is showcasing results from a Postgres TPC HammerDB benchmark.
Charlotte Lee 8:51 AM: Each core can execute faster and with less variability.
Ryan Smith 8:50 AM: Speaking of chips, the new G4ad instances with AMD GPUs I discussed here became available yesterday.
Charlotte Lee 8:48 AM: Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) was designed to keep cores busy, but it introduces performance variability and security risks.
Charlotte Lee 8:46 AM: Graviton reflects a deep understanding of modern scale-out workloads—microservices, serverless architectures, and more.
Lisa Hill 8:46 AM: Ah, it comes from physics! I thought it was a superhero reference.
Charlotte Lee 8:44 AM: Graviton is a cool name, but I’m sure quantum physicists are puzzled by its newfound popularity!
Ryan Smith 8:42 AM: My colleague Anna Brown recently posted about the performance and cost savings she found while running .NET 5 applications on Graviton2. Check it out.
Charlotte Lee 8:42 AM: One of the strengths of cloud infrastructure is the immediate access and usability it offers; no waiting for a data center hardware refresh.
Lisa Hill 8:40 AM: C6gn utilizes the latest version of Nitro chips. Danilo provided insights on this in the news blog last week.
Ryan Smith 8:39 AM: I’m looking at all the spare hardware in my room, wondering how I can get my hands on some Nitro cards!
Charlotte Lee 8:39 AM: The Nitro chips are evolving quickly; the latest version powers the new C6gn instances.
Charlotte Lee 8:38 AM: “That Mac Mini can now utilize any native AWS service.” That’s pretty exciting.
Charlotte Lee 8:37 AM: “How do you transform a Mac into an EC2 instance?”
Ryan Smith 8:37 AM: Did I just hear that adding Nitro to any server converts it into an EC2 instance? That’s amazing!
Lisa Hill 8:35 AM: We’re back with Peter discussing AWS Custom Silicon.
Charlotte Lee 8:35 AM: Alright, let’s dive into the chips!
Lisa Hill 8:35 AM: Amazon EC2, AWS Direct Connect, and AWS Shield Advanced have historically provided a resilient backbone across multiple availability zones and a secondary region for added reliability.
Charlotte Lee 8:33 AM: Being resilient during live operations is no small feat.
Ryan Smith 8:33 AM: “It’s one thing to maintain resilience during regular operations; it’s another challenge when you’re live.”
Lisa Hill 8:32 AM: Over 100 million dollars raised on their Draft-a-thon platform.
Charlotte Lee 8:31 AM: I’m surrounded by mobile phones, lighting, tripods, and microphones—several of each.
Lisa Hill 8:30 AM: Michelle explained how the NFL’s traditional satellite broadcasting system wouldn’t suffice, and they needed to go online. ESPN and AWS collaborated to find a solution.
Charlotte Lee 8:30 AM: Michelle is sharing how they turned to AWS for support during their annual announcement of new draft picks.
For further insights, check out this another blog post on the topic. You can also find valuable resources at this link, they are an authority on this subject.
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