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Peter DeSantis' Keynote at AWS re:Invent 2021

Peter DeSantis' Keynote at AWS re:Invent 2021

AWS re:Invent is always THE event in cloud. Petere DeSantis’ keynote provided a peek behind the curtain of the technology that drive AWS itself.

This πŸ‘‡ is the Twitter thread of my coverage of the keynote…

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rolling now with the keynote from Peter DeSantis, SVP Utility Computing and Apps, @awscloud

#reinvent

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this used to be Monday or Tuesday Night Live and is always one of my favourite talks of the week

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Peter giving his perspective on the start of the @awscloud

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big focus from the team before the launch was on the key word β€œElastic”

<< I’m willing to be it still is!

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early memories from the original EC2 team. 7/10 of the team are still @awscloud

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email from @JeffBezos to the EC2 team in the early days. love the focus on the user experience

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key areas of focus for EVERYTHING @awscloud

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looks like we’re starting the night by looking at storage

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remember, this is (usually) not a feature/service launch keynote. it’s typically a look behind the scenes @awscloud. lots of amazing technology and engineering challenges

#reinvent

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remember when @awscloud looked like this?

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lots of stuff build out from S3

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for a longer look back at @awscloud’s early days. be sure to check out @jeffbarr’s session, β€œ15 years of AWS with Jeff Barr”

https://virtual.reinvent.awsevents.com/login/

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we’re going right down to the fundamentals. looking at old school(ish) hard drives

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lots of mechanical engineering packed into these types of drives. Peter used a crazy airplane analogy that I won’t even try to summarize

lots of improvements but the mechanics are pretty steady

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β€œHard drives remain the best way to store large amounts of data when you need to access it immediately”, Peter << he left out, β€œβ€¦even though we don’t want that to be the case”

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β€œLet’s do some quick math”, Peter << a key indicator as to why this is always my favourite keynote

#reinvent

(sorry @werner)

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here’s what the math says : hard drives suck for these type of big data workloads

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the opposite view for a large but low usage workload

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basically the individual workload doesn’t align to the hard drive mechanics. you need to aggregate these workloads in order to smooth things out

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Peter’s currently walking through how @awscloud distributes customer S3 workloads across the physical backend of the service

it’s the only way the math adds up

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β€œIf you want to innovate at scale, you need to move quickly. AND you need to do it safely”, Peter DeSantis, @awscloud

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talking about how @awscloud approaches testing S3 now

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I love this type of deep dive. especially the contrast in the complexity behind the scenes of S3 for something as simple as a bucket/key #ux

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for testing, @awscloud is leveraging automated reasoning more and more. it’s the only way to truly test things out

more at https://www.amazon.science/

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excellent timing by the @AmazonScience team, β€œA gentle introduction to automated reasoning” << just published

https://www.amazon.science/blog/a-gentle-introduction-to-automated-reasoning

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formal tools are great. they have a very high bar for correctness

…but at the cost of speed and reducing the available talent pool

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this isn’t a great choice to face. at @awscloud’s scale, they deal with it all of the time

…so they developed a new approach, β€œLightweight Formal Methods”

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here’s a great related paper from @AmazonScience , β€œUsing lightweight formal methods to validate a key-value storage node in Amazon S3”

https://www.amazon.science/publications/using-lightweight-formal-methods-to-validate-a-key-value-storage-node-in-amazon-s3

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lots of advantages to this approach…biggest challenge would be the initial design to allow for the application of these formal methods when required

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ohhh, I beat Peter to the punch πŸ‘Š

🀣

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first customer story up, this one’s from @Adobe

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. @adobe’s intro covered how they are massive scale in the cloud, not turning to storage

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talking about photos and how we stored physical photos

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digital is a similar challenge but at a larger scale

how many photos & videos do you have?

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next year β€œwe” (not sure who that is, all of us?), we’ll generate 1,500,000,000,000 photos

#reinvent

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. @adobe turning to the two primary storage use cases for storing photos and videos

β€œI want it now"

β€œI want it sometime, whenever really”

#reinvent

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the obvious questions about this story form @adobe is why do I only get 100GB of storage with Creative Cloud then?

<< feature request == let me use my own @awscloud account of Creative Cloud storage & sharing

#reinvent

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πŸ‘† s/of/for/

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learn more about @adobe Sensei at https://www.adobe.com/ca/sensei.html

#reinvent

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. @adobe is obviously the reference customer for Amazon S3 Glacier Instance Retrieval

more on the @awscloud feature at https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/amazon-s3-glacier-instant-retrieval-storage-class/

#reinvent

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πŸ‘† it snuck under the radar for most people but it could be quite a game changer

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Peter moving on to block storage types now

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now diving into SSD technology

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SSD remove most of the mechanical challenges but they have their own issues…like the limitations of flash storage

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primary the paging system & the lifetime of those pages

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as Peter is delivering this section of the talk, I realize I know way too much of the low level functionality of both HDD and SDD.

this is the downside of nerd πŸ€“ life. lots of obscure knowledge

…but I wouldn’t have it any other way

#reinvent

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of course there are different issues at hyper scale that @awscloud has discovered with low level SSD tech

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small inconsistencies add up fast at hyper scale. things we would never notice even with hundreds of systems, they see regularly

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. @awscloud Nitro smooths a lot of this out

more on Nitro at https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/nitro/

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…of course they built their own Nitro SSD

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btw, @QuinnyPig it live tweeting this keynote as well. for his take (😈) head over to https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1466181160099139586

#reinvent

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Peter citing the performance delivered by the custom SSD approach via @awscloud Nitro

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on to @awscloud Graviton now...

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more on Graviton at https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/

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. @awslcoud is pushing Graviton everywhere. and why not? more bang for your buck in most cases w/cloud native designs

#reinvent


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Peter touches on the Graviton3 update

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have we seen these stats for Graviton3 yet?

…not that we should focus on them according to Peter (and I agree)

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I like Apple’s performance per watt approach. which @awscloud has followed as well

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more on Dennard scaling at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling

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Peter talking about power consumption now. it’s a critical attribute for all of us, mind boggling at @awscloud’s hyper scale

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How do we efficiently increase performance of a Graviton core?

Make the core WIDER

#reinvent

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there have been lots of improvements in silicon design over the past decade. the easy way to think about it is for year all we worried about was the size of the engine

we finally realized that the tires, chassis, fuel, and other attributes matter as well…

#reinvent

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…that means more cores, wider memory lanes, direct access to storage, etc.

this is why we’ve seen massive boosts in performance in things like @apple’s M1 and @awscloud Graviton3

#reinvent

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another customer story up now, this time it’s Fannie Mae

#reinvent

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Kimberly Johnson, EVP & COO of @FannieMae given the scale and scope of their operations

tl:dr = it’s big

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ooohhh, @FannieMae built out an HPC solution @awscloud Lambda. would love to get a deep dive on that one…

#reinvent

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very interesting solution from @fanniemae. they leverage some key @awscloud data services to expand credit score analysis to include rent payments…regardless of how they were made

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now talking about evaluating risk to housing due to climate change. again another massive data problem, taking unstructured data into structure data for analysis and prediction

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good customer story from @fanniemae. I think they struck the right depth to solve solutions to unique problems at a scale that’s only really possible in the cloud

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on to #ml now. I swear this is slide is even more packed than @SwamiSivasubram from earlier today

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Peter’s breaking #ml down into two big stages:
  • training
  • inference

you need different infrastructure & tools for both

#reinvent



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diving into inference now...

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more on @awscloud’s custom silicon, Inferentia, for #ml inference at https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/inferentia/

#reinvent

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we’ll get there in a minute (I’m sure) but here’s more on @awscloud Trainium, the custom chip for #ml training

https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/trainium/

#reinvent

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back to inference, @awscloud is working to improve inference work on general purpose CPUs as well. sometimes you just need to run the process where the workload is w/out the custom chips

#reinvent

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…or at least _those_ custom chips

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sticker stats for Trainium…

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Peter says the name β€œTrainium” implies training #ml models. for most, it’s probably πŸ‘‡

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β€œ..as is normal in a math party” << f--k yeah, Peter

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Peter diving into the math of #ml training runs. you need it to figure out how to scale out/up a workload to get the job done

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GPT-3 is slightly larger than BERT-Large #nlp #ml models

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these models are massive. they create their own computer science problems

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more on how to tackle these challenges the @awscloud Well-Architected Framework, Machine Learning Lens

that’s available at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/machine-learning-lens/machine-learning-lens.html

#reinvent

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more math party analogy/reference!

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…lots of room left in that graph...

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Peter talking about the biggest @awscloud EC2 instance types for #ml training

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the network optimized version of the Trn1 instance type will have 1600 Gbps network bandwidth << fantastic!

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sizing your training pool is a critical decision. not only will it impact how LONG you need to wait but also how MUCH you pay

read that Well-Architected Lens, please!

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/machine-learning-lens/machine-learning-lens.html

#reinvent

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Tranium uses a technique called β€œSystolic Array Manipulation”

going to have to dig into this one later on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systolic_array

#reinvent

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Tranium provide 16 fully programmable inline data processors. this allows further tuning for each training workload

<< still doesn’t fix the name though 🀦

#reinvent

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now we’re talking about how to round numbers. I ❀️ this stuff

super niche but fascinating

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of course Trainium supports stochastic rounding directly in hardware. because, why not?

#reinvent

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more on the @awscloud Neuron SDK at https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/neuron/

<< it abstracts a lot of what Peter just covered away, so you just get the benefits

#reinvent

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Peter is going to wrap up with sustainability and the climate pledge

more on the pledge (now over 200 signatories) at https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/about/the-climate-pledge

#reinvent

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. @awscloud is always looking to improve efficiency in every aspect of our infrastructure << we’ve heard various achievements and efforts year over year from them. it’s nice to see

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that’s a big commitment…and they are on a path to achieve it 5 years early (originally target was 2030)

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storage isn’t the only problem. moving that power around is a big problem as well

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here’s a great research piece from @voxdotcom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3ScJ_FwaZk&feature=youtu.be

#reinvent

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. @mikegchambers called this the other night in our day one recap!

#reinvent

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you can watch that recap on @mikegchambers excellent YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiJfYTqM02M&feature=youtu.be

#reinvent

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here are some other sessions at @awscloud #reinvent that focus on sustainability. be sure to check them out

#reinvent

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..and that’s a wrap from Peter. not nearly as broad as previous years but still a great deep dive into things like @awscloud custom silicon

/🧡 #reinvent

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