[HN Gopher] AWS Nitro SSD - High Performance Storage for Your I/...
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AWS Nitro SSD - High Performance Storage for Your I/O-Intensive
Applications
Author : Trisell
Score : 48 points
Date : 2021-11-30 19:15 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aws.amazon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (aws.amazon.com)
| rektide wrote:
| > _Today I would like to tell you about the AWS Nitro SSD._
|
| A bit light on technical details but very fun, very exciting.
| Kind of sad that such amazing work is no longer quite so public,
| is no longer something that say Intel is going to talk up in
| endless details with a product launch. A huge amount of the work
| & innovation here is extremely specific, extremely private- all
| this Elastic Fabric Adapter related stuff is advanced systems
| engineering, close integration of systems, that's Amazon's &
| Amazon's alone.
|
| Anyhow. This article pairs very well with the "Scaling Kafka at
| Honeycomb"[1], which I found to be a delightful read on adapting
| & evolving a big huge workload to ever-improving AWS hardware.
|
| [1] https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/scaling-kafka-observability-
| pi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29396319 (38 minutes
| ago, 13 points)
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _A huge amount of the work & innovation here is extremely
| specific, extremely private- all this Elastic Fabric Adapter
| related stuff is advanced systems engineering, close
| integration of systems, that's Amazon's & Amazon's alone._
|
| You speak my mind:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19162376 (from 3yrs ago)
| jeffbarr wrote:
| I wrote the AWS post and did my best to share lots of technical
| details; are there any specific things that you want to know
| more about?
| posnet wrote:
| Are there plans to provide Metal instances with these new
| SSDs?
| jeffbarr wrote:
| I don't know one way or the other, but great question. I
| prefer launching stuff to hinting about it :-)
| posnet wrote:
| Fair enough, and good luck with the rest of re:Invent
| lend000 wrote:
| If you have an existing EC2 instance with EBS storage and
| want to convert it to the new Nitro SSD, what will be the
| process for migration? E.g. a live swapping of attached
| storage devices, a quick reboot, or spinning up a new
| instance?
| jeffbarr wrote:
| The Nitro SSDs are currently used as instance storage,
| directly attached to particular EC2 instances.
| lend000 wrote:
| Thanks for the response. To clarify, does this mean that
| only some EC2 instances will be eligible (i.e. if I have
| an older EC2 instance I will have to re-create it)?
| Androider wrote:
| Nitro SSDs appear to only be available on specific new
| instances types, like the just announced Im4gn and
| Is4gen.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I actually think that these posts have gotten much better
| over the past 2-3 years, at least based on my taste; the
| level of technical details is just right. On specific topics,
| I wouldn't mind James Hamilton-level specifics, but you can't
| be too deep on everything all the time.
|
| (hi Jeff! Hope you're well :D)
| jeffbarr wrote:
| Hi Simone, doing well and we are trying to add more info
| while still being frugal with words and with the time of
| our readers.
| dmw_ng wrote:
| Generally a fan of your posts, but this one was very heavy on
| marketing buzzology ("cloud scale"). I can't tell if there
| was a genuine use case for designing a proprietary SSD, or if
| it were some pet project. Is "75% lower latency variability"
| because the first gen SSD was a CS101 project, or because AWS
| have developed some material edge over what others (with much
| wider scope) in the industry have been doing for years? I
| can't tell.
|
| I can't see a reason to buy or use this product.
| rektide wrote:
| Hi Jeff! Eeeeeek! I'd love to know so much more about the
| Nitro acceleration. All these accelerated fabrics are so
| interesting.
|
| * What does the Nitro accelerator look like to the host? .
| Does the Nitro accelerator present as NVMe devices to the OS
| host, or is there a more custom thing it presents as? Does
| the Nitro accelerator use SR-IOV to or something else to
| present as many different PCIe adapters, per-drive PCIe, or a
| single PCIe device, or no PCIe devices at all, something else
| entirely (and if so what)? Are there custom virt-io drivers
| powering the VMs? How much change has gone into these
| interfaces in the newest iterations, or have these interface
| channels remained stable?
|
| * What is the over the wire communication? Related to the
| above; ultimately the VM's see NVMe, & how far down the
| stack/across the network does that go? Is what's on the wire
| NVMe based, or something else; is it custom? What trade-offs
| were there, what protocols inspired the teams? Originally at
| launch it seemed like there was a custom remote protocol[1];
| has that stayed? What drove the protocol evolution/change
| over time? What's new & changed?
|
| * What do the storage arrays look like; are they also PCs
| based? Or do the flash arrays connect via accelerators too?
| Are these FPGA-based or hard silicon? Are there standard
| flash controllers in use, or is this custom? How many
| channels of flash will one accelerator have connected to it?
| How much has the storage array architecture changed since
| Nitro was first introduced? Do latest gen nitro & older EBS
| storages have the same implementation or are newer EBS
| storages evolving more freely now?
|
| * On a PC, an SSD is really an abstraction hiding dozens of
| flash channels. There have been efforts like Open Channel
| SSDs and now zoned namespaces to give the PCs more direct
| access to the individual channels. Does the Nitro accelerator
| connect to a single "endpoint" per EBS, or is the accelerator
| fanning out, connecting to multiple endpoints or multiple
| channels, doing some interleaving itself?
|
| * What are some of the flash-translation optimizations & wins
| that the team/teams have found?
|
| And simply: * How on earth can hosts have so much
| networking/nitro throughput available to them?! It feels like
| there's got to be multiple 400Gbit connections going to hosts
| today. And all connected via Nitro accelerators?
|
| It's just incredibly exciting stuff, there's so much super
| interesting work going on, & I am so full of questions! I was
| a huge fan of the SeaMicro accelerators of yore, an early
| integrated network-attached device accelerator. Getting to
| work at such scale, build such high performance well
| integrated systems seems like it has so so many interesting
| fascinating subproblems to it.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8DVmwj3OEs#t=11m58s
| b9a2cab5 wrote:
| Intel has stopped disclosing a lot of details on their newer
| products, probably because they're no longer far and away the
| market leader. I think if AWS ever develops a 4-5 year lead
| over everyone else we'll see similar disclosures out of them.
| Facebook publishes a lot of info about Oculus asynchronous
| reprojection techniques and computer vision because they have a
| 2/3 marketshare in VR.
| ahepp wrote:
| One question I have is, I thought the cloud was supposed to
| abstract this kind of stuff away? Shouldn't cloud services be
| sold in the "solution domain" rather than by picking the backing
| technology behind your tool?
|
| For example, why not have a file/object/whatever storage service;
| and a price matrix that lets you select key metrics like latency,
| throughput, and variability of either?
|
| I don't particularly care if my ultra fast ultra low latency is
| derived from SSDs, spinning rust, RAM, l2 cache, or acoustic
| ripples. But I'm not super in tune with cloud services to begin
| with.
| MR4D wrote:
| They already do. But some customers want to more finely control
| the various trade offs with different technology
| implementations, and services like this allow them to do so.
| Everyone else can keep using what they already have.
| judge2020 wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, EBS (as in, elastic block storage) already
| allows this, but it often won't beat the latency of a local
| SSD.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| I think it comes down to the fact that at the end of the day,
| your software runs on real hardware, which isn't perfect. So
| rather than hide these imperfections behind an opaque surface,
| AWS let's you peek behind the scenes to optimize your software,
| debug issues, etc. It's really useful if you're working at a
| large scale.
|
| They also have things like Lightsail if you don't care about
| the details and just want the packaged solution.
| ksec wrote:
| >The second generation of AWS Nitro SSDs were designed to avoid
| latency spikes and deliver great I/O performance on real-world
| workloads. Our benchmarks show instances that use the AWS Nitro
| SSDs, such as the new Im4gn and Is4gen, deliver 75% lower latency
| variability than I3 instances, giving you more consistent
| performance.
|
| Tl;dr: They now have custom SSD firmware that avoid latency
| spikes.
| david927 wrote:
| Directly between Armenian and Azerbaijani, Google translate
| should add AWS.
| chrsig wrote:
| That'd give them the opportunity to put an ad for google
| cloud right above it!
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