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AWS re:Invent 2018: Powering Next-Gen EC2 Instances: Deep Dive into the Nitro System (CMP303-R1)

Amazon Web Services

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Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.

56K views7 years ago1 recommendation

Systems programmingCloud and DevOpsAWSOperating systemsPerformance and optimization

An in-depth look at the design and architecture of the AWS Nitro System, explaining how hardware offloading enables high-performance EC2 instances.

The Nitro system is a rich collection of building block technologies that include hardware offload and security components built on AWS. It is powering the next generation of EC2 instances with an ever-broadening selection of compute, storage, memory, and networking options. In this session, we deep dive into the Nitro system, explore its design and architecture, discover how it enables innovative new EC2 instances, and understand how it has made the seemingly impossible, possible. Complete Title: AWS re:Invent 2018: [REPEAT 1] Powering Next-Gen EC2 Instances: Deep Dive into the Nitro System (CMP303-R1)

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1 person recommends this

What people say. Recommended as an excellent explanation of how AWS Nitro offloads virtualization, storage, and networking to dedicated hardware.

_msw_on Hacker News • Recommends

On “Twitter migrates data to Google Cloud”

Hi! I'm from the EC2 engineering team. This is a super challenging problem for general purpose virtualization stacks. EC2 has been working to avoid any guest VM interruptions. With the Nitro hypervisor, there are no management tasks that share CPUs with guest workloads. See more here, including data from a real customer with real-time requirements running on EC2 under the Nitro hypervisor: link to this video

richardowrighton Hacker News • Mentions

On “Hackers Can Slip Invisible Malware into 'Bare Metal' Cloud Computers”

Full post from eclypsium link . Also I assume aws baremetal servers are not vulnerable due to the nitro security card ( link to this video ).

rektideon Hacker News • Mentions

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

Hi Jeff! Eeeeeek! I'd love to know so much more about the Nitro acceleration. All these accelerated fabrics are so interesting. * What does the Nitro accelerator look like to the host? . Does the Nitro accelerator present as NVMe devices to the OS host, or is there a more custom thing it presents as? Does the Nitro accelerator use SR-IOV to or something else to present as many different PCIe adapters, per-drive PCIe, or a single PCIe device, or no PCIe devices at all, something else entirely (and if so what)? Are there custom virt-io drivers powering the VMs? How much change has gone into these interfaces in the newest iterations, or have these interface channels remained stable? * What is t…

walterbellon Hacker News • Mentions

On “ZFS Without a Server Using the Nvidia BlueField-2 DPU”

DPUs/SmartNICs are a partial industry response to AWS Nitro (based on Annapurna acquisition) which performs I/O (network/storage) virtualization. Nvidia DPU is based on Mellanox acquisition AMD DPU is based on Pensado acquisition Intel has an in-house DPU There was a 2018 talk on AWS Nitro, link to this video Cadence summary: link James Hamilton summary: link The founder of Annapurna-Nitro is now at link , which has created the NVMEoF (NVME over Fabric, i.e. Ethernet or FiberChannel) standard. This is implemented via a software driver or hardware accelerator. Both DPUs and NVMEoF can be viewed as an attempt to standardize "composable data center" architectures pioneered by AWS Nitro. > but this i…

transputeon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Barrelfish OS Architecture Overview (2013) [pdf]”

…Bromium, acquired by HP (which previously acquired BIOS company from Bromium co-founder). The former CTO of XenSource co-founded Qumranet (KVM), acquired by RedHat. AWS began with Xen, then migrated to a subset of KVM. Nitro used Arm hardware to virtualize I/O (storage, network) paths, leaving KVM responsible for x86 CPU and memory virtualization, link to this video & link . Parallels could be drawn to the Apple T2 enclave (Arm) coprocessor being used for disk encryption on x86 Apple Macbooks. Under the "Confidential Computing" umbrella, Intel has TDX and a new (closed?) hypervisor on servers, using SGX and new hardware privilege levels. Apple recently added Secure eXclaves to iOS, and Apple Silicon…