AWS re:Invent 2022 - Dive deep on AWS networking infrastructure (NET402)

About this Video

• Video Title: AWS re:Invent 2022 - Dive deep on AWS networking infrastructure (NET402)
• Channel: AWS Events
• Speakers: JR Rivers, Stephen Callaghan
• Duration: 01:04:06

Introduction

This AWS re:Invent 2022 session (NET402) provides a deep dive into the AWS networking infrastructure. The speakers, senior principal engineers JR Rivers and Stephen Callaghan, discuss the underlying technologies, principles, and innovations used to build and maintain the AWS network, aiming to make the network effectively invisible to customers.

Key Takeaways

1. Guiding Tenets: AWS prioritizes customer data protection (encryption, sanitization), high availability (redundancy, diverse power feeds, SRLG monitoring), on-demand capacity scaling (building new regions, local zones, etc.), diverse supply chains, and high performance (building on a high-performance foundation, judicious use of traffic engineering).
2. Network Evolution: The AWS network has evolved through three phases: consuming commercially available hardware and software, creating custom devices from existing components, and innovating with custom-designed hardware and software to meet unique needs.
3. Clos Network Architecture: AWS utilizes a Clos network architecture (folded Clos) for its high-performance, non-blocking bandwidth, enabling efficient scaling and minimizing failure impact.
4. Innovations: Key innovations discussed include custom ASICs, single-chip platforms, hardware BMCs, phase amplitude modulation for optical modules, module access offload, a hybrid control plane (combining distributed and centralized approaches), and ENA Express (providing SRD capabilities to all ENA adapters).
5. Monitoring and Auto-remediation: AWS employs passive and active monitoring systems (billions of observations per minute) and a correlation engine to identify and automatically remediate network issues, minimizing customer impact and maintaining high performance.