AWS re:Invent 2014 | (SPOT302) Under the Covers of AWS: Its Core Distributed Systems

What people said

rubiquity · 2022-05 · Recommendation

> “There are only three modes for a distributed system - it implements paxos/raft itself, it relies on a data store that implements paxos/raft or it’s wrong.” That sounds like something Al Vermeulen would say. Though my recollection of the quote is more along the lines of: "There are three types of consistent distributed systems: paxos, broken protocols, and single points of failures." I'm guessing the talk it came from is Under The Covers: Core Distributed Systems Primitives that Power Our Platform[0]. That presentation is full of great insight into how AWS thinks about distributed systems. The other presenter, Swami, is the VP of AWS Databases now but started off getting Amazon's initial Paxos implementation going. I was lucky enough to work on those core building blocks and it was an incredible experience. 0 - [VIDEO]

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throwdbaaway · 2025-10 · Reference

> But I did not expect something as core as the service managing the leases on the physical EC2 nodes to not have recovery procedure. I guess they don't have a recovery procedure for the "congestive collapse" edge case. I have seen something similar, so I wouldn't be frowning at this. A couple of red flags though: 1. Apparent lack of load-shedding support by this DWFM, such that a server reboot had to be performed. Need to learn from [LINK] 2. Having DynamoDB as a dependency of this DWFM service, instead of something more primitive like Chubby. Need to learn more about distributed systems primitives from [VIDEO]

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dtjohnnymonkey · 2022-08 · Reference

I just watched a talk on this the other day (assuming it's same person since he's saying the same thing) the other day: [VIDEO]

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