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AWS re:Invent 2017: How Netflix Tunes Amazon EC2 Instances for Performance (CMP325)

Amazon Web Services · 18.4K views · 2017-12-13 · 56:55

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Overview

A Netflix performance engineer presents how Netflix tunes EC2 instances, covering instance type choice, Xen modes, SR-IOV and kernel tuning. The goal is near bare-metal performance in the cloud.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as an example of workload-dependent performance tuning at scale and of Netflix's AWS practices.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2018–2022

Topics

Cloud, DevOps & reliabilitySoftware performance & optimizationOperating systems & kernels
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ec2netflixkernel tuningawslinux performance

What people said

dijit · 2022-05 · Reference

it was actually 5x, my bad, but here's the references: Original info being mentioned as a rumour (2016): [LINK] Slides for confirmation by Greeg (2017): [LINK] Talk (2017): [VIDEO] More discussion: [LINK] Original tweet has been deleted, but I have a screenshot here slide 9: [LINK]

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ignoramous · 2019-03 · Reference

Well, most distributions choose saner defaults. For instance, RHEL/CentOS/AmazonLinux use noop io-scheduler by default for SSD based machines. Though, I get your point: for instance, the TCP keep-alive defaults aren't suitable for all kinds of workloads: [LINK] I guess, that's why performance tuning is an art form as it is workload dependant: [VIDEO]

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scarface74 · 2018-05 · Reference

They use a lot of AWS services - not just virtual machines - First they use Ubuntu Linux - SES (Email) - ElasticSearch (AWS has their own managed version) - SQS (queueing system) - S3 (storage) -auto scaling Most of the optimization's they do are standard things at scale where they are tuning by measuring performance. [VIDEO] and the slide deck from the presentation. [LINK] But that's even more of a reason to choose AWS, Netflix has open sourced dozens of tools specifically related to AWS. You get to take advantage of their tools and knowledge.

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Sources

Video by Amazon Web Services, played through YouTube.

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