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Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS
Marc Olson, a long-time Amazonian, discusses the evolution of EBS, highlighting hard-won lessons in queueing theory, the importance of comprehensive instrumentation, and the value of incrementalism versus radical changes. It's an insightful look at how one of AWS’s foundational services has evolved to meet the needs of our customers.
Because of the physics involved, the IOPS performance of a hard drive has remained relatively constant for the last few decades at approximately 120-150 operations per second, or 6-8 ms average IO latency. A really consistent lesson at AWS is that system performance issues almost universally span a lot of layers in our hardware and software stack, but even great engineers tend to have jobs that focus their attention on specific narrower areas. After some trial and error—and help from our material scientists—we found heat resistant, industrial strength hook and loop fastening tape, which also let us service these SSDs for the remaining life of the servers.
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