[HN Gopher] When Amazon Switched from Sun to Linux ___________________________________________________________________ When Amazon Switched from Sun to Linux Author : fanf2 Score : 456 points Date : 2021-01-09 00:45 UTC (22 hours ago) (HTM) web link (twitter.com) (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com) | rconti wrote: | No doubt Solaris on SPARC was more reliable (particularly on | higher-performance boxes) than Linux on x86 at the time, but tons | of decent-sized hosting-type companies were running on Linux in | the late 90s, and I worked at one. Obviously at Amazon's scale | this was a massive migration, and giving up the support of Sun | would be hard, but, hell, Google was launched on Linux at the | time too. | | That said, I was supporting Sparc Solaris through the late 2000s | and the Oracle workloads were the last thing to move to Linux | most places. The sheer power of the Sun boxes, along with the | single-throat-to-choke was fairly unbeatable. No hardware vendor | to look down their nose at you for using a "hobbyist" OS and | imply that the problem must be at the Operating System level. | | And, of course, you couldn't really replace those huge Sun Fire | 6800 type servers with Linux. | mjgs wrote: | Great bit of history/context around cloud computing, even if | there is a bit of dispute as to how big the impact was, it's | still super interesting. | sumanthvepa wrote: | Okay. I was at Amazon too in that time frame, and I don't recall | the Sun to Linux transition to be all that big a deal. | | Amazon was always at that time facing challenges on every front, | the dot-com bubble breaking etc. There was a large build out of | distribution centres around this time that was very expensive. | | This was just one more of the challenges they faced. I may not | have been senior enough to be privy to all the details, but I | don't think this particular migration brought the company to near | bankruptcy. That's a stretch. | | I think the big migration was the database, and it took time, and | Oracle was having some difficulties with running on Linux. But we | were already using Linux boxes on our desktops since 1999. | Webservers had switched to Linux around 1999. And migrating core | code base which mostly C/C++ with Java starting to appear to | Linux was mostly a challenge for the infrastructure teams and one | of those routine large projects that every company has. I don't | recall anybody talking of bankruptcy for this reason. | sumanthvepa wrote: | The big problem with Linux at the time was large files, and | memory addressing limitations of 32bit architectures. x86_64 | was still too new and only introduced in 1999. There were other | issues as well, that in the intervening 20 years have been more | than addressed. Today's Linux is of course far superior to any | OS that existed at the time. | dfox wrote: | All Unix-like systems had exactly the same issues with large | file support on 32b architectures. The solution was | standardized in 1996 and adopted by most relevant OSes | relatively quickly. Another issue is that support for large | files has to be opt-in for user space code and this opt-in | has to be same for all modules that share anything whose ABI | depends on sizeof(off_t). | | Server software that needs larger address space than what is | conceivable size of main memory became somewhat common only | after mass adoption of amd64. In fact, amd64 is first 64bit | architecture where it is common to have 64-bit only | userspace, essentially all "64b" unix vendors in 90's shipped | systems with most of userspace built in 32b mode (IIRC this | includes even technically 64b-only OSF/1 AXP^W^WTru64, which | while running on CPU that really does not have 32b mode had | 32b ABI in the style of linux's x32 ABI). | bostik wrote: | > _shipped systems with most of userspace built in 32b | mode_ | | Gah, so that's where ARM's THUMB instruction set got its | inspiration from. | rvp-x wrote: | All of the BSDs have 64bit off_t, they had to break the ABI | for the BSD lawsuit settlement anyway and used that | opportunity to make this change. | fulafel wrote: | Linux ran on other 64-bit architectures before that. WP says | "1995: First 64-bit Linux distribution for the Alpha | architecture is released" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64 | -bit_computing#64-bit_operat... | easytiger wrote: | X86_64 wasn't widely available until around 2005 which is | also when Java added support for it | Jtsummers wrote: | The first AMD64 processor was the Opteron released in 2003, 4 | years after the announcement. | iso1210 wrote: | OP might have been thinking of Itanium (ia-64), a different | 64 bit PC architecture from Intel. It was shockingly | expensive | | There was certainly development on ia64 in the kernel in | 1999 under Project Trillian [1][2], although the first chip | wasn't released commercially until 2001 | | Alternatively they may have been thinking about PAE, which | was released in 1999 and allowed linux kernels to address | upto 64GB on a 32 bit processor [2] | | [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/1999/3/9/48 | | [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Trillian | | [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extensio | n#His... | projektfu wrote: | PAE was also used for Microsoft Windows 2000 Server | Datacenter Edition. Server machines at the time capable | of holding 64GB RAM were beasts, IIRC on the order of | hundreds of thousands of dollars. A desktop machine with | 512MB memory was considered way more than you needed. I | used a Toshiba Tecra 9000 laptop with 256GB for mostly | Java and C++ development and never felt like I was | anywhere near maxing it out. | | PAE might not have met Amazon's needs for holding their | catalog or whatever. If they were trying to directly | address a data structure that was larger than 4GB, they | would have needed some sort of trickery as PAE was | usually implemented kernel side to provide separate 4GB | address spaces to individual processes with more than 4GB | total physical backing. | icedchai wrote: | I remember early versions of Java not running terribly well on | Linux. It ran, but performance was bad. I'm thinking the 1.2 | and 1.3 versions. I worked for a startup and did some Java and | Oracle work around that time, moving apps from Sun to Linux | based demo systems. | bartread wrote: | Can confirm. Around 2000 - 2001, on RedHat 6 or 7.something | Sun's 1.2 JVM was basically unusable: slow and extremely | buggy. IBM's JVM (HotJava? - it's all so long ago I can't | remember what it was called) was much better: it was a bit | faster and it didn't fall over for a pasttime. The 1.3 | releases were better but still not much to shout about. I | can't remember whether the 1.3 Sun JVMs were good enough to | allow us to run our software with them at the time. | | (Topically, at around this time, we were targeting Solaris | 6.x and 7.x based systems.) | _old_dude_ wrote: | Java on Linux was interpreted until 1.3.1/1.4 when the VM, | named ExactVM, was replaced by HotSpot which includes a | JIT. | | At that time, I remember deciding to prototype a B2B store | in Java and then rewrite it in C++ when i will know what i | was doing. I never rewrite that soft because Java becomes | fast enough overnight. | | In a sense, SUN kill itself with Java. | icedchai wrote: | Makes sense. Sun peaked during the dot-com boom. I worked | at several different startups, both full time and as side | gigs, and they all had Suns. I remember Enterprise 3500's | and later 250 and 450's being popular around that time. | | After the crash, you had to basically give that stuff | away. I knew a guy who had 10 Sun boxes (all less than 5 | years old) at home because a local company wrote them | off. I had a couple of low end Ultras (an Ultra 2 and | Ultra 10) but sold one of them off. The Ultra 2 I got | used for pennies on the dollar at an auction. I think it | was like $200 for what was a $15K machine years earlier. | | Sun was so far ahead of it time. Solaris was a solid OS, | but once Linux became "good enough", somewhere in the '99 | to '03 timeframe, depending on industry, it was over for | them. | beagle3 wrote: | To add: this is Red Hat Linux 6 or 7, not Red Hat | Enterprise Linux - I fondly remember RHL 7.3 in 2002 as the | last RedHat I liked; updates were still through RHN or Red | Carpet (don't remember if yum was already used). | | RHEL, Fedora etc arrived later. | bartread wrote: | Yes, exactly, when RedHat was still RedHat as it were: I | haven't used either Fedora or RHEL since that division | took place. Tbh that's more about circumstance than | coming at it with any particular axe to grind but, these | days, I can't see much of a reason to choose either of | them over Ubuntu. Not for the projects I'm involved with, | anyway. | commandlinefan wrote: | I honestly remember them not running that well on Sun, | either: in the 90s, I could consistently get Java on windows | to outperform Java on Sun. | icedchai wrote: | I'm not surprised. Early Sparc chips weren't much to write | home about. I had a Sparc 10 at home for a while. It made a | great X11 desktop. The later UltraSparc systems, like the | Enterprise series, were powerful, supported tons of CPUs, | memory, and IO but single threaded CPU performance still | wasn't stellar. | | At one startup, we had like 10 people logged in to a E3500 | for Java builds. The thing had 512 megs of RAM, huge for | the time, but with 10 people compiling and running java | apps with a min heap of 64 megs, you got into swap pretty | quick. It had these enormous disk arrays attached. I think | it was 2x Sun Storage arrays with 16 disks each, each one | being like 20 gigs or something, for a total of 640 gigs | before the RAID. We were also running a database instance | on the single box (Sybase, I think), which didn't help. A | lot of people started running their apps on their Windows | desktops. | | This was pretty early, late 98 or early 99. We basically | had built our own app server on top of Apache JServ, which | predated Tomcat. | KMag wrote: | Porting code from SPARC to x86 is much easier than the other | way around. Most x86 instructions allow unaligned reads/writes, | whereas SPARC will SIGBUS on unaligned access (at least on the | processors from the late 1990s). The SPARC memory model is also | more lax than x86, so x86 hides more concurrency bugs than x86 | does. | gpderetta wrote: | While the SPARC architecture allows for a very relaxed memory | model, I belive all SPARC implementations have been TSO (i.e. | exactly the same as x86) for a long time (and IIRC even non | TSO SPARCs had mode bits to force system wide TSO). | masklinn wrote: | > I belive all SPARC implementations have been TSO (i.e. | exactly the same as x86) for a long time (and IIRC even non | TSO SPARCs had mode bits to force system wide TSO). | | The internet does indicate that that seems to have been the | default, though it was possible to enable more relaxed | models starting from v8 (PSO) and v9 (RMO). | | Most of the relaxation seems to have been dropped in the | meantime: | | > SPARC M7 supports only TSO, with the exception that | certain ASI accesses (such as block loads and stores) may | operate under RMO. [...] SPARC M7 ignores the value set in | this field and always operates under TSO. | | GP may have confused SPARC and Alpha, the latter having | (in)famously relaxed approach to memory ordering (uniquely | reordering even dependent loads e.g. if you load a pointer | then read the value at that pointer you may get stale | data). | matthias509 wrote: | By default yes, though I worked on a codebase which was | ported from M68k to SPARC which had a lot of misaligned | memory access. You could opt into having "packed" structs | with #pragma pack and avoid the runtime error by compiling | all the code with --misalign. | | As I recall, this had a performance penalty since memory | reads/writes are now byte-by-byte. Also it could make code | which assumed atomic reads/writes of 32 bit quantities go | awry. | dekhn wrote: | On the other hand, on Sun machines you could free() the same | pointer twice, but on Linux, it would crash. This led to some | small effort during early ports. | tinalumfoil wrote: | > The SPARC memory model is also more lax than x86, so x86 | hides more concurrency bugs than x86 does. | | I think you mistyped this sentence. Did you mean x86 is more | lax, so SPARC hides more concurrency bugs? Am I correct that | more concurrency bugs would be hidden in a less lax | architecture? | mhh__ wrote: | You're more likely to luck into the behaviour you want with | x86 than a more relaxed memory model. I think the Alpha | takes the pip for the latter, but I was only something like | 3 months old when the IP was sold to Intel let alone in | widespread use, so I could be wrong. | KMag wrote: | Yes, the DEC Alpha AXP was a beast of a chip family. The | Alpha design team made nearly as few guarantees as | possible in order to leave nearly as much room for | optimization as possible. The Alpha's lax memory model | provided the least-common denominator upon which the Java | memory model is based. A stronger Java memory model would | have forced a JVM on the Alpha to use a lot more atomic | operations. | | All processors (or at least all processors I'm aware of) | will make a core observe its own writes in the order they | appear in the machine code. That is, a core by itself | will be unable to determine if the processor performs | out-of-order memory operations. If the machine code says | Core A makes writes A0 and then A1, it will always appear | to Core A that A0 happened before A1. As far as I know, | all processors also ensure that all processors will agree | to a single globally consistent observed ordering of all | atomic reads and atomic writes. (I can't imagine what | atomic reads and writes would even mean if they didn't at | least mean this.) | | On top of the basic minimum guarantees, x86 and x86_64 | (as well as some SPARC implementations, etc.) have a | Total Store Ordering memory model: if Core A makes write | A0 followed by A1, and Core B makes write B0 followed by | B1, the two cores may disagree about whether A0 or B0 | happened first, but whey will always agree that A0 | happened before A1 and B0 before B1, even if none of the | writes are atomic. | | In a more relaxed memory model like the SPARC | specification or Aarch64 specification (and I think | RISC-V), if the machine code says Core A makes write A0 | before A1, Core B might see A1, but not yet see A0, | unless A0 was an atomic write. If Core B can see a given | atomic write from Core A, it's also guaranteed that Core | B can see all writes (atomic and non-atomic) that Core A | thinks it made before that atomic write. | | With the DEC Alpha, the hardware designers left | themselves almost the maximum amount of flexibility that | made any semantic sense: if Core B makes an atomic read, | then that read (and any reads coming after it in machine | code order) is guaranteed to see the latest atomic write | from Core A, and all writes that came before that atomic | write in machine code order. On the Alpha, you can think | of it as all of the cores having unordered output buffers | and unordered input buffers, where atomic writes flush | the core's output buffer and atomic reads flush the input | buffer. All other guarantees are off. (Note that even | under this very lax memory model, as long as a mutex | acquisition involves an atomic read and an atomic write, | and a mutex release involves an atomic write, you'll | still get correct behavior if you protect all reads and | writes of shared mutable state with mutexes. A reader's | atomic read in mutex acquisition guarantees that all | reads while holding the mutex will see all writes made | before another thread released the mutex.) This might be | slightly wrong, but it's roughly what I remember of the | Alpha memory model. | | The thing that confused some programmers with the Alpha | is that with most memory models, if one thread makes a | ton of atomic writes, and another thread makes a ton of | non-atomic reads, the reading thread will still never see | the writes in a different order than what the writer | thought it wrote. There's no such guarantee on Alpha. | | On a side note, the Alpha team was also pretty brutal | about only allowing instructions that were easy for | compilers to generate and showed a performance | improvement in simulations on some meaningful benchmark. | The first generation of the Alphas didn't even have | single-byte loads or stores and relied on compilers to | perform single-byte operations by bit manipulation on | 32-bit and 64-bit loads and stores. | | Many of the Alpha design people went on to the AMD K6 III | (first AMD chips to give Intel a run for their money in | the desktop gaming market), the PASemi PWRFicient (acqui- | hired by Apple to start their A-series / Apple Silicon | team), AMD Ryzen, etc.) | | When I bought my first computer in the fall of 1997, the | fastest Intel desktop processors were 300 MHz PIIs. DEC | Alphas at the time were running at 500 MHz, and had more | instructions per clock, particularly in the floating | point unit. The Cray T3E supercomputer used DEC Alphas | for good reason. | masklinn wrote: | > On top of the basic minimum guarantees, x86 and x86_64 | (as well as some SPARC implementations, etc.) have a | Total Store Ordering memory model: if Core A makes write | A0 followed by A1, and Core B makes write B0 followed by | B1, the two cores may disagree about whether A0 or B0 | happened first, but whey will always agree that A0 | happened before A1 and B0 before B1, even if none of the | writes are atomic. In a more relaxed memory model like | the SPARC specification | | AFAIK SPARC has always used TSO by default, and while v8 | and v9 introduced relaxed memory modes (opt-in), these | have been dropped from recent models e.g. M7 is back to | essentially TSO-only. While it is backwards-compatible | and supports the various instructions and fields, it | ignores them and always runs in TSO. | jabl wrote: | IIRC SunOS/Solaris always used TSO, but Linux originally | used RMO, however they switched to TSO once chips that | only supported TSO appeared on the market. | qwertycrackers wrote: | No, a strict concurrency model means things are more likely | to be consistently sequenced; that is, you'll encounter | less actual concurrency artifacts. If this model is made | more lax, you might discover that you had UB which the | previous model was not exploiting. | KMag wrote: | > Am I correct that more concurrency bugs would be hidden | in a less lax architecture? | | No, a more strict (less lax) memory model gives the | processor less freedom to re-order memory operations, | meaning that missing memory fences (explicit ordering) have | potentially less effect vs. more lax memory models. | | The SPARC memory model makes fewer guarantees (less | strict), allowing the processor more freedom in ordering | memory operations, potentially getting more performance. | (There's a reason aarch64 went with a more lax memory model | than x86, despite being designed decades later.) The | downside is that bugs with missing memory fences are more | likely to show up. | commandlinefan wrote: | I'm having trouble following - can you post a code | example? | Majromax wrote: | This has been in the news again lately with Apple | Silicon. The ARM architecture has a weaker memory model | than x86 in that it does not normally provide "total | store ordering". Under that memory model, if thread A | executes (from an initially zeroed heap): | a = 1; b = 1; | | then thread B can safely execute: if (b | == 1) assert(a == 1); if (a == 0) assert(b == | 0); | | x86 provides this guarantee, but ARM does not -- thread B | might see the b=1 write before the a=1 write. | | Apple Silicon has a runtime toggle (https://old.reddit.co | m/r/hardware/comments/i0mido/apple_sili...) to provide | for that behaviour, which greatly improves performance of | translated x86 code (i.e. the translator does not need to | insert precautionary memory barriers). | zorked wrote: | That series of posts should be seen in the context of someone | who was working on a Solaris to Linux migration (like EVERY | company at the time) trying to claim credit for creating cloud | computing. This is NOT the origin story for EC2, which started | as a skunkworks project in Cape Town. | ignoramous wrote: | EC2 wasn't the first AWS service though it is the most | fundamental one. | | AWS (IaaS) was started after Andy Jassy, who was _Chief of | Staff_ or _Technical Assistant to the CEO_ at the time (2003 | /4), came up with a different vision for "Web Services" [0] | to solve web-scale infrastructure problems every single | project at Amazon then faced (and so, couldn't ship fast). | That is, until Andy reinvented it, "Web Services" was simply | limited to access to Amazon's catalog of SKUs [1][2]. As (may | be) part of "Web Services" they also ran Target, AOL | (shop@AOL), and toys-r-us' e-commerce stores [2]. Mechanical | Turk showed up in 2004/5, S3 followed early 2006, whilst SQS, | EC2 launched mid 2006 [3], and SimpleDB late 2007. | | [0] https://youtu.be/9XTdhpYV168?t=457 | | [1] https://reference.wolfram.com/language/WebServices/tutori | al/... | | [2] https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=99979&se | qNu... | | [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20210109135519/http://www.new | sfl... | simonebrunozzi wrote: | You're almost correct. | | SQS I believe started in 2004, but in a very limited | capacity. I think that MTurk also started in 2004. | | Andy Jassy is the one that came up with the vision for AWS. | S3 was called S4 at the beginning! There was a big vision | on the payments part, but I think S3 + EC2 took off faster | than anyone expected, and I credit these two as the main | reason why (IMHO) AWS has been so incredibly successful. | | I had the privilege to work and interact with Andy Jassy in | my past (I was at AWS 2008-2014 and I met him and sat with | him numerous times, despite I wasn't based in Seattle), and | I can say that I'm pretty sure I've never seen a leader as | focused, as effective, as visionary as Andy. | | The "2 pizzas team" structure at Amazon and therefore at | AWS was also very conducive to running many experiments and | failing fast. | gautamsomani wrote: | Just curious - how did the name S3/S4 get coined? What is | the story/rationale behind it? | nasalgoat wrote: | Simple Storage Service - three S's. | 0df8dkdf wrote: | really? So EC2 is a DARPA program? Would make sense as | Internal is also a military project. | | EDIT: can you provide some links thanks to this. Thanks. | oli5679 wrote: | Below is a link with some of the history of EC2. | | It wasn't linked to Darpa but it was developed as an | experimental project by an autonomous team in South African | office lead by Chris Pinkham and initially Amazon were | quite secretive about it. | | """The designation "skunk works" or "skunkworks" is widely | used in business, engineering, and technical fields to | describe a group within an organization given a high degree | of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, with the task of | working on advanced or secret projects. """ | | https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-amazon-exposed-its-guts- | th... | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works#:~:text=The%20des | i.... | iso1210 wrote: | Wikipedia says | | Amazon EC2 was developed mostly by a team in Cape Town, | South Africa led by Chris Pinkham. Pinkham provided the | initial architecture guidance for EC2 and then built the | team and led the development of the project along with | Willem van Biljon. | | with links to a Register piece | | https://www.theregister.com/2010/06/25/nimbula_cloud_os/ | | And | | https://web.archive.org/web/20100621120705/http://itknowled | g... | geoduck14 wrote: | Please share stories of what early Amazon was like. Did you | realize you were building a massive company at the time? | chihuahua wrote: | I worked there for a few years in the early 2000s and it | seemed like such an unremarkable company that wasn't going to | go anywhere. The stock was always around $20 and whenever it | went up, Bezos usually said something that investors didn't | like and drove down the stock price (free shipping, search | inside the book, etc). | | Then there was the Segway deal where I amused myself by | checking the orders database to see how many they sold | (because the numbers were so small) | | If you told me back then that the stock was going to $3000 | some day, I would have stuck around for longer. | jsolson wrote: | This was my feeling in 2010 when I accepted an offer. It | was a much bigger company by then, but upon joining it | still felt stodgy and like any other big corp. I wonder if | it still feels that way if you're there (I left in 2013). | pram wrote: | It definitely is, it actually made me look back fondly at | my time at Oracle if that says anything lol. The fact | that it remains an aspirational job (gotta grind leetcode | for FANG!) makes me smirk | akhilcacharya wrote: | I'm not sure what you mean by this. Can you elaborate? | icedchai wrote: | If you knew people who worked at Oracle, it might make | more sense... | dash2 wrote: | ... this makes me suspect that investors are idiots. | motoboi wrote: | This proves that predicting the past is much easier than | predicting the future. | icedchai wrote: | It's all easy looking backwards. If you went through the | dot-com boom, bust, and the chaos in between, not so | much. If it was easy, everyone would've bought Apple and | Microsoft stock in the 80's and just let it ride. | dsr_ wrote: | It is so much easier to spot things in hindsight. We can | all see the evidence that supports the conclusion. | | Let's take Uber. Their core product is a social media app | with mapping, tracking and billing features. It has burnt | through an incredible amount of money trying to kill | competitors, employing 20,000 or so people directly and | claiming that a self-driving electric fleet will someday | make them insanely profitable. | | Market cap is up almost 80% in the last year. | | Who's the idiot? The investor who believes that Uber will | be insanely profitable in N years, or the investor who | doesn't want any more exposure to Uber than as part of a | whole-market index? | projektfu wrote: | I remember meeting some Amazon developers at OOPSLA around | 2000 and being pretty unimpressed. Like they told me they | didn't really know what they were doing there and were just | getting out of the office. Then, 2 years later, they started | hiring the best, and the rest is history. | | I think hiring top-quality, motivated engineers doesn't just | give you good software, it also provides all the idea | generation that you're going to need to enter businesses you | never thought about before. | sumanthvepa wrote: | Amazon was already a public company and pretty big that time. | But I don't think people like me realised what big could mean | 20 years into the future. | pjmlp wrote: | Stop using Twitter for blog posts, by all means use medium if it | must. | kenned3 wrote: | Seriously. Let me post this blog posting, 280 characters at a | time.. that seems like a great, reader-friendly approach. | aritmo wrote: | There is a common typo in the tweet thread, it's *vicious | circle*, not viscus circle. | | Ref: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuous_circle_and_vicious_ci... | draw_down wrote: | Come on | blinkingled wrote: | Switching to Linux in 2000 for something as busy as Amazon.com | was a really ballsy move. I remember fighting kernel panics and | hangs under load on RH7 - java workloads. This was pre RMAP VM | and I vaguely remember the JVM was able to trigger Linux VM | scalability issues due large number of anonymous page mappings. | | For all the money they were charging Sun did really put lot of | engineering effort into Solaris and SPARC. | kev009 wrote: | If you read the other DE respond in the tweets, it was | DEC/Compaq Alphas. I think it's kind of insane to have gone | from 64b back to 32b (and the DE claims it caused big issues). | Seems like API alphas running Linux would have been a better | play until Opteron made it clear amd64 had a lot of runway. | 205guy wrote: | I remember reading Sun's financial statements at the time and | bragging about huge 50% margins and thinking that can't last. | In some alternate timeline, Sun would've lowered their prices, | stayed in the game, and we'd all have rock solid Sparc laptops | by now. | blackrock wrote: | "We're the dot in dotcom." | | Well, they ended up as the .loser instead. | DonHopkins wrote: | Sun: "We put the dot into dot-com!" | | Microsoft: "Oh yeah? Well we put the COM into dot-com. | Pthththth!" | | IBM: "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how | they were going to connect the dots. Badoom psssh!" | | https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand- | computin... | badocr wrote: | That was Cisco slogan. | blihp wrote: | No it wasn't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njnNVV5QNaA | blackrock wrote: | That was terrible. | | Thanks for the LOLs. | projektfu wrote: | I remember looking at the invoice for a SPARCStation 20 and | thinking, you know, it's a little better than a $2,000 PC, | but it's not 10 times better. | tempfs wrote: | Yeah, no way to survive in the computing game very long with | super high margins. | | https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/profit-. | .. | giovannibonetti wrote: | What about Apple? | yyyk wrote: | Sun didn't have Jobs's Reality Distortion Field technology. | It can't work otherwise. | danielscrubs wrote: | Oh but Sun did. It's what made them rich and it wasn't | pretty. | bcrl wrote: | We (the Linux kernel community) put a lot of work into | scalability back then. One time we delayed a Red Hat release | several weeks due to a persistent bit flip on an NFS filesystem | on one of our stress tests that we thought was a kernel bug. It | ultimately turned out to be a broken Cisco switch that was | happily fixing up the CRC and checksums on the NFS packets it | was bit flipping. | blinkingled wrote: | Of course. Sun was ahead of the curve in OS scalability and | SMP hardware departments and for some time Solaris was still | the best OS to run databases and Java. | throw0101a wrote: | The SPARCcenter 2000 had 20 sockets in 1992: | | * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun4d#SPARCcenter_2000 | | * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation | | The Cray CS6400 had 64 in 1993: | | * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_CS6400 | | SunOS 4.1.4 was released in 1994 and SunOS 5.x ("Solaris | 2") started in 1992. | h2odragon wrote: | The Sparc2k was a _beast_. I got on in 1998 that (among | other tasks) ran the IRC bot for our channel with a 4gb | text quotes database to chain off of. ( "Shut up, lucy"). | It usually ran at a load average of 4 to 12 per CPU. I | had just over 1TB of disk array on it; in 4 dozen, full | height, 5 inch 23GB SCSI drives. | | I sank about $10k into that system in ebay parts. at the | time there just wasn't any way to get such bandwidth out | of x86, but used gear was cheap. if you could afford the | time, sweat and blood to keep it running. | bcrl wrote: | Sun also made some pretty awesome x86 servers. It's sad | that so many of the vendors left standing today have such | crappy IPMI implementations. | Bluecobra wrote: | I used to work at a shop that had hundreds of X4100's | running x86 Solaris 10. It was a pleasure to work those | hosts. Solaris had some really cool stuff like ZFS, | dtrace, Zones/Containers, SMF, etc. | yetanotherme wrote: | And now you read the release notes with dread as you | witness more and more functionality being dropped because | they choose not to maintain it. Luckily there is FreeBSD | Bluecobra wrote: | Yeah it's a shame. If Sun would have made Solaris (both | SPARC/x86) free sooner, they might have prevented the | mass exodus of companies moving off to save money. | jabl wrote: | In retrospect, they should have gone down the Sun386I | path back in the day, instead of changing gears and | spending $$$ building up the SPARC architecture and | ecosystem. | mhh__ wrote: | They were all but dead (AFAIK) by the time I was was born, so the | old Unixes and RISCs all have a ghostly feel to them to me at | least. It's quite strange reading many now-ageing compiler texts | talking about 386 as a wacky ISA soon to die out. | | I really want an Alpha box to play with, partly out of curiosity | but partly to feel like a _real man_ programming with next to no | memory consistency. | | Although they didn't help themselves it does seem like the | probably-ending dominance of X86 has hurt the industry up til | now. | | edit: It's a pretty crap ISA, controversial? | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | > the old Unixes and RISCs all have a ghostly feel to them to | me at least. It's quite strange reading many now-ageing | compiler texts talking about 386 as a wacky ISA soon to die | out. | | Illumos and the BSDs seem to be doing okay, and ARM is huge. | The x86 family didn't die out but it _is_ wacky. | | > I really want an Alpha box to play with, partly out of | curiosity but partly to feel like a real man programming with | next to no memory consistency. | | I'm pretty sure ARM will give you that. | jakub_g wrote: | Another story from same author from few months ago where he | recounts yearly Xmas spikes in early AMZN years where everyone | including Bezos was packing boxes to meet the demand: | | https://mobile.twitter.com/danrose999/status/130489658608692... | billwashere wrote: | Link to consolidated version | https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1347677573900242944.html | etaioinshrdlu wrote: | "Sun servers were the most reliable so all internet co's used | them back then, even though Sun's proprietary stack was expensive | & sticky." | | A few things in the article start to rhyme a bit with where | NVIDIA is at today. An expensive, proprietary, sticky stack. | Purchased in large quantities by startups... | | An acquaintance who was at Sun and now NVIDIA tells me "Please | don't be Sun... please don't be Sun!" | | Granted, NVIDIA is also in a great position in the gaming market, | so they look pretty diversified and safe to me. | rasz wrote: | Nvidia was founded by SUN people after all. | rmk wrote: | I remember Amazon hiring a lot of systems research people in | 05-06. They were very keen on Xen, judging by the people they | were hiring. I wonder if they still use Xen post their Citrix | acquisition. | jen20 wrote: | EC2 was famously built on top of Xen, but as of 2017, new | instance types are based on Nitro, which uses parts of KVM | instead. Brendan Gregg wrote up a good history of this [1] | (there may be an updated version somewhere, too). | | [1]: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws- | ec2-virtuali... | hermanradtke wrote: | A different version of how EC2 came to be: | | http://blog.b3k.us/2009/01/25/ec2-origins.html | donflamenco wrote: | He is wrong and is corrected later on in that tweet. At that | time, AMZN was mostly DEC Digital Unix. The DNS and mail servers | were Linux in 97. AMZN started with SUNW (pre 97), but switched | to Digital Unix because it was 64bit and could fit the catalog | into RAM. | projektfu wrote: | But SPARC v9 (UltraSPARC) was already 64-bit (44-bit effective) | at the time. There must have been more to it than just 64-bit | addressing. | protomyth wrote: | This tweet: | | _Peter Vosshall_ | https://mobile.twitter.com/PeterVosshall/status/134769756024... | | _No. The entire fleet was Compaq /Digital Tru64 Alpha servers | in 2000 (and '99, and '98). Amazon did use Sun servers in the | earliest days but a bad experience with Sun support caused us | to switch vendors._ | | So, the title is wrong. | donflamenco wrote: | Well, like every internet company in 99, there was SUN | servers. There was a lone sun workstation that printed some | of the shipping docs in latex. I believe that was left by | Paul Barton Davis. By early 97, the website (Netscape) and | database (Oracle) ran on DEC Alpha hardware. Peter is wrong | about switching to Digital Unix because Sun had bad support. | The switch happened for 64bit reasons. | | There was almost a 24 hour outage of amazon.com because | Digital Unix's AdvFS kept eating the oracle db files. Lots of | crappy operating systems in the those days. | mtmail wrote: | We had 2-3 Sun boxes at Amazon German '99/2000 but I'll be | honest it was a pet project by the local IT director. Even | having a different shell on those annoyed me. Compaq/DEC | Alpha was used for customer service, fulfillment etc. | ayewo wrote: | Multiple folks on Twitter hinted at inaccuracies in Dan | Rose's recollection of events at Amazon. In fact, when you | mentioned Paul Davis, I realized I was looking through the | comments to see him [1] point out these inaccuracies since | he is known to hang out here on HN. | | 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pauldavisthe1st | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | I can't point out inaccuracies for that time period, | since I left in January of 1996. | jeffbee wrote: | I worked at a company that thought they had bought their | way to reliability with Sun, Oracle, and NetApp but we had | a three-day-long outage when some internal NetApp kernel | thing overflowed on filers with more than 2^31 inodes. | Later the same company had a giant dataloss outage when the | hot spare Veritas head, an expensive Sun machine, decided | it was the master while the old master also thought so, and | together they trashed the entire Oracle database. | | Both hardware and software in those days were, largely, | steaming piles of shit. I have a feeling that many people | who express nostalgia for those old Unix systems were | probably 4 years old at the relevant time. Actually living | through it wasn't any fun. Linux saved us from all that. | [deleted] | wahern wrote: | > Linux saved us from all that. | | My fingers still habitually run `sync` when they're | idling because of my innumerable experiences with | filesystem corruption and data loss on Linux during the | 1990s. There were just too many bugs that caused | corruption (memory or disk) or crashes under heavy load | or niche cases, and your best bet at preserving your data | was to minimize the window when the disk could be in a | stale or, especially, inconsistent state. ext3, which | implemented a journal and (modulo bugs) guaranteed | constant consistent disk state, didn't come until 2001. | XFS was ported to Linux also in 2001, though it was | extremely unreliable (on Linux, at least) for several | more years. | | Of course, if you were mostly only serving read-only data | via HTTP or FTP, or otherwise running typical 90s | websites (Perl CGI, PHP, etc, with intrinsically | resilient write patterns[1]), then Linux rocked. Mostly | because of ergonomics and accessibility (cost, | complexity); and the toolchain and development | environment (GNU userland, distribution binary packages, | etc) were the bigger reasons for that. Travails with | commercial corporate software weren't very common because | it was uncommon for vendors to port products to Linux and | uncommon for people to bother running them, especially in | scenarios where traditional Unix systems were used. | | [1] Using something like GDBM was begging for | unrecoverable corruption. Ironically, MySQL was fairly | stable given the nature of usage patterns back then and | their interaction with Linux' weak spots. | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | It didn't use LaTeX anymore by the time I left in early 96. | I had already templated the PDF that LaTeX used to | generate, and written C code to instantiate the template | for a given shipment. | theanirudh wrote: | > Jeff started to think - we have all this excess server capacity | for 46 weeks/year, why not rent it out to other companies? | | If Amazon rented out excess capacity after Nov/Dec, what did they | do for next years Nov/Dec peak? Did they build up more capacity | throughout the year and not rent it out? | Havoc wrote: | hmmm...the comments suggest there may be some artistic license at | play there. | Tistel wrote: | Sorry if this has been asked already. Out of curiosity, what did | they replace oracle with? Postgres, MySQL, both? Or did the roll | their own? | mrkramer wrote: | "I was at Amzn in 2000 when the internet bubble popped. Capital | markets dried up & we were burning $1B/yr." | | "Amzn came within a few quarters of going bankrupt around this | time." | | "Amzn nearly died in 2000-2003." | | Current Google's CFO Ruth Porat saved Amazon during dot-com crash | [1] , she advised them to go to Europe to raise money otherwise | they would face insolvency. | | [1] https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/5/15190650/amazon- | jeff-... | jgalt212 wrote: | ? Why should a business in 2000 have to build its own datacenter? | | But in 2020, most small/medium sized business could be run on | two-ish beefy boxes. With a cloudflare, or similiar, firewall | there simply is no need to build your own or rent a datacenter. | markhahn wrote: | Linux wasn't shocking or daring back then. Literally everyone | could see that proprietary unixes (and their locked-in hardware) | were doomed. "Attack of the killer micros" had already succeeded. | Exactly which micro was still somewhat unsettled. | desas wrote: | It depends upon your environment, it wasn't clear to many | people. | | I thought that proprietary unix was doomed when I started an | internship at a bank's IT ops department in 2005. The seasoned | Solaris admins I worked with had commissioned some Linux | servers the year before in a non-prod setting and had written | it off as a toy... | [deleted] | williesleg wrote: | They had to switch, how else can they dd those virtual machines | and spin them up elsewhere and steal everything? | lizknope wrote: | > even though Sun's proprietary stack was expensive & sticky | | What is he referring to? | | I'm in the semiconductor industry and in the 1990's everyone had | a Sun workstation on their desk. We had large 16 CPU Sun servers | in the closet for bigger jobs. Since everything was either | command line or X11 it was easy to set your DISPLAY variable and | display things remotely. | | All of the EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tools ran on Sun / | Solaris. Some of these tools from Cadence and Synopsys have list | prices of over $1 million per license. | | Those big Sun monitors with DB13W3 connections were expensive. We | started putting Linux / x86 boxes with 21" monitors on engineers | desks and running programs remotely from the big Suns. We even | started stacking the old desktop Sun workstations in the closet | and running stuff remotely from them because people liked the | bigger PC monitors. | | By 2000 the EDA software companies were recompiling their | software for Linux. I talked to a few and they said it was a | pretty easy recompile. x86 was getting to be faster and so much | cheaper. | | We added a couple of -sun and -linux flags to the CAD wrappers. | Everything was still connected over NFS with the same shell and | Perl scripts. Honestly the transition was pretty seamless. When | AMD released their first 64-bit chips we bought a lot of them and | retired our final Suns that were only around for >4GB jobs. | martinald wrote: | There's a lot of revisionist history around what AWS allowed. | | RackShack and other companies offered pretty cheap (started at | $99/month IIRC) dedicated Linux servers which loads of startups | used before AWS. There was also various virtual machine providers | in the market. | | These articles make it sound like every company before AWS had to | build their own datacenter or at least buy a million dollars | worth of Sun hardware to put a website online. | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | The biggest thing that AWS offered in the beginning was extreme | proximity to the backbone. Their services have grown by the | dozens, and other hosting services have followed suit, but they | remain (as far as I know) one of the closest points [ EDIT: | without co-location ] you can put a VM to the backbone. | kazen44 wrote: | Heck, | | old colleagues of mine have been doing "dedicated/shared | hosting" for the better part of nearly 25 years. | | virtual private servers have existed for 20 decades+. | vasco wrote: | I think 20 decades might be a bit of an exaggeration. | Misteur-Z wrote: | IBM mainframes virtual machines saying hello => "It is | directly based on technology and concepts dating back to | the 1960s" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/VM | krallja wrote: | 20 decades ago would be 1821 A.D., four decades before | the First American Civil War. | breck wrote: | No I actually remember reading a letter Lovelace wrote to | Babbage about problems with chroot | throwaway20148 wrote: | That's what the CIA would have you believe. | kazen44 wrote: | ofcourse you are right, | | i meant 2 decades :) | vp8989 wrote: | That's funny because AWS definitely feels like the IBM or Sun of | this current era. I wonder what comes along next or if AWS is the | "end of history". | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | AWS is in their 1970's IBM phase. Riding high, wealthy, good | reputation, not much real competition. In 10 years they will be | knocked on their heels as they fail to adjust to a new industry | change. | | My suspicion is that eventually AWS will become the | "mainframes" of tech, and a new software+hardware paradigm will | make all their services obsolete and their hardware too | expensive. My money's on the return of store-and-forward | communications. Once your watch has as much power and storage | as a SunFire T2000, and every IoT device can store terabytes of | data on gigabit networks, who the hell needs redundant servers? | pjmlp wrote: | Cloud computing is the mainframes of 21st century, with | upgraded terminals, so it suits them. | Ericson2314 wrote: | AWS is not the end of history. The hardware arch is still | completely insane PC lineage too much, and now that electricity | not hardware costs predominate, the calculus is has shifted | tons. | motyar wrote: | We feel same as amazon felt for Sun, Thinking about switching to | fast and cheaper alternatives, or self host it. | gscott wrote: | VPS servers are an excellent deal get a big one then run | containers on it. | motyar wrote: | Yes, tried that last night. Moved code to VPS. | | Its nodejs app, what are advantage or running in containers? | yetanotherme wrote: | Until you need them, none. They sort of become self evident | and you'll know when you're in the market for them. For | now, don't waste time on premature optimization. | hacker_newz wrote: | Interesting that this thread seems to attribute a lot of the | early AWS decisions directly to Jeff Bezos when everything I've | read before indicates it was a collaborative effort including | Andy Jassy. https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/02/andy-jassys-brief- | history-... | KMag wrote: | Right out of school (early 2000s), I did network modelling | consulting. My main client bought a Sunfire V1280 box (12 CPUs, | and the server room guys hated me for the amount of power it | drew/heat it put out) to run network simulations. As I remember, | the main two advantages SPARC and POWER systems being sold at | that time over x86 were (1) reliability and (2) memory / I/O | bandwidth. | | I tried to look up who first said something along the lines of "A | supercomuter is a tool for turning a compute-bound problem into | an I/O-bound problem" and all I could find was an ArsTechnica | article referencing it as an old joke. I thought it was an old | joke by someone of the stature of Cray or Amdahl, but maybe | that's apocryphal. | | In any case, our network simulations attempted to perform a min- | cut (using number of packets as the cost metric) to partition | simulation nodes among threads, run one thread per core, and pin | a thread to each core. With a network simulation, though, as you | can imagine, the problem was usually bound by memory bandwidth. | | Also, the client was a defense contractor, and the 400k+ USD box | was an artefact of "use it or lose it" budgeting. If they didn't | spend all of their budget by December 31st, the group's budget | would be reduced the following year. In their case, the high cost | of the box was a feature. | PeterStuer wrote: | It is not a just the public sector. "Use it or lose it" budgets | are endemic in large enterprises as anyone who has contracts | with them can confirm. | random5634 wrote: | Ahh - govt budgeting - I've been there. | | What is a bit funny is after fighting for $1,000 during the | year, some budget manager calls in a panic near year end - how | fast can you spend $150K - on anything you want. Turns out - as | Amazon has noticed with cheap stuff, whoever has stuff in stock | and can ship quick gets the deal - price totally irrelevant. | | There was a while during the stimulus spending where | politicians were I guess getting heat for not spending stimulus | money fast enough, so the pressure to spend got pushed down big | time. Every layer was trying to push spending out as fast as | they could. | | For those not familiar with this area and wondering why a | higher level agency would push spending rather than trying to | save money? | | A lot of govt budgets between appropriation and final vendors | are based on % of allocated spending. So a state agency will | take 10%, a local agency will take 10%, and then it ends up in | the hands of whoever does the work. Everyone above has built | their budgets on all the money being spent. They've staffed for | that. | | So if you show up and spend 50% of your allocation, now they | only get 50% of their 10% and can be in a real jam, | particularly if they have already spent their entire expected | amount or committed to spend it (staff have been hired). It can | be hard to re-budget amounts between vendors / recipients so | the pressure on whoever didn't spend all their money can be | intense, because it's messing up a whole chain of other | budgets. | Mountain_Skies wrote: | Why has it become so popular to break what should be blog posts | into endless streams of tweets? The content is unreadable. | markmark wrote: | Because most people don't have blogs these days and it's not | worth setting one up for a one-off short thing like this. | | It's also perfectly readable for its target audience of people | who use twitter. | sumnole wrote: | agreed, but still better than reading a book for what could | have been a blog post. | justinv wrote: | https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1347677573900242944.html | pengaru wrote: | convenience and laziness are powerful forces | lscotte wrote: | I don't know but agree it's unreadable and terrible, so I don't | bother to read them. | hyakosm wrote: | You can comment or share individual blocks in one click, I | guess it's the point of that. | forgotmypw17 wrote: | i just skip it, along with js-only sites. | | i used to get frustrated like you. | | then i realized that both correlate heavily with crap content, | which makes sense, since the same person writing is also | choosing the platform. | | these days i say thanks for their self-filtering and move on to | the next link. | | there is more content than i can read as it is. | mark-r wrote: | This is why I like Hacker News. If the content transcends the | medium, it will get a high enough ranking to bubble to the | front page. | globular-toast wrote: | The most addictive games are those with a small marginal | commitment of playing another game. It's incredibly easy to | rack up hours on such games, yet if you asked people if they | were prepared to commit hours to the game they'd be likely to | say no. | | Twitter is even worse. Not only does it not make the time | commitment clear up front, the tweets are short enough that you | read them automatically. Then you're hooked into the doom | scroll as you keep automatically reading one after another. | | As a writer it means you don't need to bother with structure | and other classical writing skills to keep your reader | interested. You can just write disconnected chunks of text and | rely on twitter to keep them interested. | sidewinder128 wrote: | I cancel my twitter/FB/Google etc, all that sns no-sense so I | cannot read it, I think is a good thing. | stevewodil wrote: | Probably audience reach, I'm guessing tweeting the information | directly as opposed to a link to a blog results in more | engagement. | | As for why Twitter specifically it's because that's where their | followers are, it will get the most views presumably vs. other | platforms or mediums. | | FWIW I personally enjoy tweetstorms, I'm not sure why. I think | the break in between each tweet is nice, it's like reading a | series of messages rather than a blog post and I find myself | more engaged. It also means the author has to be fairly concise | saurik wrote: | This is largely why I do it. I have half a million twitter | followers, and while I can write it on my blog and then tweet | a link, it is nowhere near as effective as just publishing | the content directly on Twitter. | | FWIW, I _used to_ despise it when people did this (post | massive threads of messages), but frankly I think they fixed | the UI for this years ago, and just don 't understand the | complaints anymore: you click the link, and can scroll | through messages as if it were an article. | | Between it auto-flowing the messages and the longer tweet | length of 280 characters, I honestly don't see any advantage | to those "thread readers" people keep linking to... they | don't even have larger information density, which is | ridiculous. (Hell... they frankly seem to make the text | _harder_ to read!) | | (And yeah: I carefully write my tons of text on Twitter such | that every single message is a carefully enough crafted | thought that they could just about stand alone, which I think | is actually good for the content.) | enw wrote: | Hey, sorry for being off-topic. | | Just wanted to say thanks for making Cydia! It feels very | nostalgic to me. | stevewodil wrote: | Wow, it is SO weird to see the name "saurik" replying to my | comment. | | I remember in middle school jailbreaking my iPod touch to | install all kinds of cool tweaks from Cydia, and I'm sure | that exposure led me to continue messing around with | electronics. | | Thank you for all you did for the community, I attribute a | lot of my interest in computers and coding to the early | jailbreak days. | tjoff wrote: | _you click the link, and can scroll through messages as if | it were an article._ | | No you can not. Often times the posts are not in order. You | have to expand multiple times and if you are unlucky you | get pulled into another direction and miss half the story. | | Unreadable isn't hyperbole. Maybe you have to have an | account for it to be usable? | | Note: the posted twitter-thread is the first I've seen that | actually works for me. Not sure why that is. | sundarurfriend wrote: | > frankly I think they fixed the UI for this years ago, and | just don't understand the complaints anymore | | "fixed the UI" is a big overstatement - they improved the | UI from utterly horrible to barely usable (for this | purpose). | | > you click the link, and can scroll through messages as if | it were an article. | | Imagine if someone wrote an article by creating a phpBB | forum thread and posting every couple of sentences as a | post on the thread. That's what this is like, for the rest | of us - since you have a half million followers, your brain | is probably used to filtering out all the crap and parsing | the posts quickly. But the vast majority of us don't use | Twitter as much or at all, and this adds a mental tax for | all of us. | | That's why the thread readers are so successful - you're | not the target audience of them, but most of the rest of | the Internet users are. | 300bps wrote: | I never use Twitter but I have an account and the app | installed on my iPhone. This particular story displayed | in an extremely easy to read format for me on my phone. | Was very similar to reading a blog page. | e12e wrote: | > I honestly don't see any advantage to those "thread | readers" | | Do you typically read Twitter in an app or via the web? | | I find it annoying enough to read Twitter on the web - that | I don't. Part of that is the fact that Twitter spends | sizeable screenspace nagging me to log in - which | presumably isn't a problem if you have an account. | sundarurfriend wrote: | I too find this type of posting horrible, and avoid opening | these generally. Part of my problem is specifically with | Twitter UI and slow load times though, so when I do feel like | it's worth opening, I use a Nitter redirect addon in my | browser. Loading via Nitter instances is much faster for me, | and works without even needing Javascript. | marcuskaz wrote: | I worked at ETRADE around the same time and led the migration | from Sun to Linux on the software side, switching everything to | Apache was once a radical idea. We switched to IBM machines and | not HP, a Sun server cost around $250k and the equivalent Linux | server was $5k and outperformed the Sun machines. It still was | considered risky by CTOs. | | During the dotcom boom there was huge competition for ordering | Sun machines and it was difficult to get enough, we were | competeting with eBay to get our hands on machines. | | During the crash, we went back to eBay as a seller and couldn't | off load all the old Sun machines. | | Here's an article from the time: | https://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Projects-Enterprise-Planning... | cthalupa wrote: | From replies to that thread, it looks like there are multiple | errors. | | One reply is from one of the original engineers working on EC2 | that said this swapover had nothing to do with AWS and it's | origins, and another reply is from a former distinguished | engineer stating that they swapped from compaq/digital tru64 | alpha servers, not sun. | darksaints wrote: | Sometimes there are a lot of people that experience part of the | story that there can be multiple versions of the truth, each | seemingly different, but all still fitting in with a larger | narrative. | | In 2012 I joined Amazon in a a small data analytics org within | the supply chain. We were tasked with reducing split shipments: | multiple item orders that could not ship out on a single box. | The top reason for splitting a shipment was because we simply | didn't have the right combination of items in a single | fulfillment center. By the time I had gotten there, my manager | had already successfully implemented the first transshipment | network, moving items from one warehouse to another so they | could ship out with the right combination of items and reduce a | split shipment. But by then we were reaching diminishing | returns on transshipment, and splits were still rising | nationwide, and I was given the chance to provide analysis and | new insights. | | I probably ran a million analyses that year, but one of the | most salient was that the major reason for splitting shipments | was because we we sold so few of one of the items that it | didn't make sense to keep more than one or two in stock | nationwide. Those types of tail items were typically stocked in | one of three fulfillment centers, the largest of the | fulfillment centers in three regions of the US. And the number | of orders getting split shipments between those three | fulfillment centers was massive...more than enough to cover the | cost of daily cargo plane transshipments between the three | fulfillment centers. | | I ended up leaving that team and moving on, eventually leaving | Amazon completely. Right about the time I left, Amazon made a | huge anouncement: Amazon Prime Air (eventually renamed Amazon | Air to distinguish between the drone delivery idea). The press | releases made it sound like they were launching it to deliver | packages nationwide, but a quick call to my former colleague | confirmed that upon launch, the only items they were moving was | unpackaged inventory ... cargo plane transshipment, as my | analyses had pushed for a few years earlier. Since then, | they've expanded to actually moving customer shipments, but the | service was initially entirely justified based on an analysis | of split shipments I had done years earlier. | | I say this because all humans like telling stories about | themselves and the oversized contribution they had on something | that made it big. It's cool, and it makes us feel important. | But I was hardly the only person that worked on that project. | There were likely dozens of others who were pushing for cargo | planes for different reasons and maybe the transshipment story | was enough to tip it over the edge. There were many more who | bought into a crazy idea really early and came to own it, at | least far more than someone who did a throwaway analysis years | earlier. And they all probably have different versions of the | same story. And they can all be true simultaneously, at least | true enough to matter. Because none of us have a perfect | recollection of the past...we all have a history written into | our minds that is colored by the experience that we lived. | bredren wrote: | > Sometimes there are a lot of people that experience part of | the story that there can be multiple versions of the truth, | each seemingly different, but all still fitting in with a | larger narrative. | | This also applies in families, in retelling of historical | events. | | In addition, the capability of the story teller to enthrall | can cause their version of the story to be weighted more | strongly than others. | | This can lead to a situation where the story told by the | better "showman" gets an outsized credence. | | Beware one person's recollection, and recall that | extemporaneous notes are the next best thing to a recording | because it is that hard to remember what happened. | | If your goal is influence, you must be at least as good of a | story teller as someone else talking about something you have | a memory of. | geoduck14 wrote: | That is cool, to be able to see yourself in a bigger project. | Thanks for sharing. | mkl wrote: | And Linux was released in 1991, not 1994. | gizmodo59 wrote: | 1.0 was 1994 | [deleted] | zhubert wrote: | Well this was an interesting thread to see pop up. | | Hi, I'm Zack, I was a Sr. Unix Administrator at AMZN in 1999 and | worked alongside very talented folks like snovotny, lamont, | yvette, grabatin, gborle, jamison, craig, and so many others. The | responses from Benjamin Black and Peter Voshall are correct. | | We definitely were on DEC Tru64 at this time. Sun was running the | big databases like ACB. I recall worries that obidos might not be | able to build in a few months time so the engineer with the | little corgi (Erik?) spiked out a linux build and then it was | linux pizza boxes as quickly as we could build them. | | We built CMF and other things to handle mass provisioning but it | was chaotic for quite a while. I don't recall anyone talking | about what would later become AWS in those days. | alexhutcheson wrote: | > I recall worries that obidos might not be able to build in a | few months time | | What was going to cause this? | [deleted] | nabla9 wrote: | It took 10 years for Amazon stock to recover back to dot-com- | bubble levels. | mark-r wrote: | I think that's more a comment on the insane dot-com bubble era | valuations than anything else. | tyingq wrote: | I'd argue they went a bit early. Pre x64, so they would have been | moving from 64 to 32 bit. And Linux, at the time, had a variety | of issues at scale with kernel panics, leaks, etc. | jamra wrote: | The last comment stated that Amazon recently spent a lot of | effort ripping out Oracle. I would be interested in knowing how | that was done and how much better things got afterwards. | SmooL wrote: | Fairly certain they're alluding to Amazon's company wide effort | to get off of oracle databases, with most teams opting to use | dynamodb instead. AFAIK it took about ~4 years. | | Source: interned / worked at amazon for a bit a few years back | mxz3000 wrote: | They definitely didn't replace oracle with dynamo, those are | very different beasts and would require complete redesigns of | the migrated service. RDS sounds much more | appropriate/realistic. | SmooL wrote: | Part of the reason for opting towards dynamodb was it's | essentially unlimited horizontal scaling. I know at least 1 | team had scale that was just too large for traditional | relational DBs, so dynamodb it was. The other part was a | large amount of sql usage was essentially just as a | key/value store anyway, and dynamodb was vastly cheaper. I | agree that RDS is much more akin to oracle, but in my | (extremely) limited exposure to teams doing the migration, | the majority we're going to dynamodb. As another poster | replied, it was clearly a different story in different | orgs. | kablow wrote: | In at least a few orgs I've seen the switch was to RDS | (usually postgres) instead of dynamodb because they couldn't | justify an entire redesign of the schema at the same time as | the switch. It was a huge effort with a lot of late nights | especially at the very end of the cutover. | blinkingled wrote: | I don't know how much things got better from performance | standpoint - Oracle is pretty good on that front - but they | built their own Aurora database adding all the missing features | to it and then migrating to it. (Bunch of blog posts on Aurora | look it up.) Knowing what I know about Oracle licensing it must | have gone pretty well on the money front! | akhilcacharya wrote: | One way things got better is they just migrated to pre- | existing, externally available AWS services for many | applications. Being able to sell them to Amazon teams at | internal cost, getting performance and scale benefits and being | able to use AWS primitives for orchestration is a major win. | | Here's a PR piece about it: | https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-... | pavelevst wrote: | ironically, but now AWS become such "commonly used but too | expensive" solution for most of companies, which many of us | already getting rid of ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-09 23:02 UTC)