Subject
15 entries
Aws
Bookmarks
AWS Nitro Enclaves Attack Surface
Trail of Bits analysis of AWS Nitro Enclaves' attack surface, covering vsock vulnerabilities, side-channel risks, entropy issues, and the trust model's assumptions. Essential reading before building confidential computing workloads on Nitro.
Cloud Costs Every Programmer Should Know
Vantage's reference on cloud costs every programmer should internalize — covering compute, storage, networking egress, and database tiers across AWS, GCP, and Azure with rough mental models for estimating costs. Essential calibration for engineers making architectural decisions.
AWS S3 Signed URLs in Django
A guide to generating AWS S3 presigned URLs in Django — allowing clients to upload or download files directly to S3 without routing through your application server. Standard pattern for handling file storage in Django applications at scale.
Using the Kani Rust Verifier on a Firecracker Example
Kani is AWS's Rust model checker — a formal verification tool that proves correctness properties of Rust code by exhaustively exploring execution paths. This post shows it applied to Firecracker, AWS's microVM hypervisor, demonstrating industrial-scale use of formal methods.
How Amazon Web Services Uses Formal Methods
Newcombe et al. (CACM 2015) describe how Amazon Web Services engineers use TLA+ to specify and verify distributed systems protocols, finding real bugs in S3, DynamoDB, and EBS before deployment. One of the few industrial accounts of formal methods working in production at scale.
Near-Linear Scaling of Gigantic Model Training on AWS
Amazon Science's post on achieving near-linear scaling when training gigantic language models across thousands of GPUs on AWS infrastructure. Covers parallelism strategies (tensor, pipeline, data) that make training 100B+ parameter models economically feasible.
libaws: AWS Should Be Easy
libaws is Nathan Tippy's opinionated Go CLI that wraps AWS APIs to make them 'easy' — single-command Lambda deployments, simplified IAM, and declarative infrastructure for common patterns. A lightweight alternative to CDK/Terraform for developers who want less abstraction.
How Affirm Uses AWS Fargate and Apache Airflow for Batch Jobs
Affirm's engineering blog post on running Apache Airflow DAGs on AWS Fargate for batch job management — serverless task execution without persistent workers. A practical architecture case study for ML and data pipeline orchestration at a fintech scale.
The Complete AWS Lambda Handbook for Beginners
Dashbird's intro to AWS Lambda — the event-driven serverless compute model, execution contexts, triggers, IAM roles, and key gotchas like cold starts and timeout constraints. A solid foundation for serverless architecture thinking.
Building a Data Lake with AWS S3 and Athena
A tutorial on replacing a costly Redshift cluster with a serverless data lake using AWS S3 and Athena — demonstrating 16-minute queries reduced to 11 seconds at 10 cents a run using Parquet, partitioning, and Glue ETL. Practical architectural migration case study.
Auto Scaling API with AWS Spot Instances
Adapty's guide to designing a scalable API on AWS using spot instances — how to structure your infrastructure to tolerate spot interruptions while dramatically reducing compute costs. A practical architecture pattern for cost-conscious API deployments.
Gartner: AWS Five Times the Size of Cloud Competitors Combined
Gartner's 2013 finding that AWS infrastructure capacity was five times the next 14 cloud providers combined — the market share number that made AWS's dominance narrative concrete and widely quoted. A useful baseline for understanding how lopsided the early cloud market was.
Amazon Glacier: Ultra-Low-Cost Archival Storage
Amazon Glacier launched in 2012 as an ultra-low-cost archival storage service at $0.01/GB/month — an order of magnitude cheaper than S3. The tradeoff was retrieval latency of hours, not milliseconds, making it purely for cold data.
Benchmarking High Performance I/O with SSD for Cassandra on AWS
Netflix's 2012 benchmark of SSD-backed Cassandra on AWS EC2 — showing 3-4x latency improvements over spinning disk for their use case. An early real-world data point on SSD economics in cloud distributed databases.
Getting Started with Amazon EC2
Paul Stamatiou's 2012 getting-started guide to Amazon EC2 — launching instances, SSH access, security groups, and basic server setup. Representative of the era when 'cloud' meant learning EC2 from scratch with no managed services.