The Curious Engineer

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Perspectives

perspectives.mvdirona.com

James Hamilton's Blog

Distributed systems / cloudHardwareDevOps / SRE / infrastructure

’10’15’20’25
Posts
451 from 29 Oct 2007 to 6 Jul 2026
Posting
now and then (4 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/feed/

2026 3

  1. Zoox Hayward Start Of Production
  2. Flat Datacenter Networks at Scale
  3. National Academy of Engineering

2025 2

  1. Blue Current
  2. Darlington Nuclear Generating Station

2024 3

  1. Pat Selinger
  2. Seagate HAMR
  3. CIDR 2024

2023 1

  1. Amazon Elastic Block Store at 15 Years

2022 5

  1. Great Product Managers
  2. HPTS 2022
  3. 2022 NAE Frontiers of Engineering
  4. A Short History of AWS Silicon Innovation
  5. Graviton3 & EC2 C7g General Availability

2021 4

  1. Xen-on-Nitro: AWS Nitro for Legacy Instances
  2. Happy 15th Birthday EC2!
  3. Tesla Project Dojo Overview
  4. Reinventing Operational Resiliency

2020 4

  1. Human Race Priorities?
  2. How Complex Systems Fail
  3. Anandtech on AWS Graviton2
  4. AWS Graviton2

2019 5

  1. 2019 SIGMOD Systems Award
  2. 2019 ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award
  3. Tesla Full Self Driving ASIC
  4. AWS Nitro System
  5. Collision at Sea: USS Fitzgerald

2018 6

  1. AWS Inferentia Machine Learning Processor
  2. AWS Designed Processor: Graviton
  3. Choose Technology Suppliers Carefully
  4. 2017 Turing Award: Dave Patterson & John Hennessy
  5. Will ML training drive massive growth in networking?
  6. MySQL 5.6 to MariaDB 10.2.13

2017 8

  1. Four DB2 Code Bases?
  2. When You Can’t Afford Not to Have Power Redundancy
  3. Top 50 Corporate Revenue
  4. Tensor Processing Unit
  5. How Many Data Centers Needed World-Wide
  6. Airline Overbooking isn’t Evil
  7. At Scale, Rare Events aren’t Rare
  8. CS Responder Trans-Oceanic Cable Layer

2016 7

  1. KVH Industries Tour
  2. AWS re:Invent 2016
  3. Advice to Someone Just Entering Our Industry
  4. David Patterson Retires After 40 Years
  5. A Decade of Innovation
  6. Everspan Optical Cold Storage
  7. Volkswagen Emissions Fiasco

2015 9

  1. VPC NAT gateways : transactional uniqueness at scale
  2. ARM Server Market
  3. Data Center Power & Water Consumption
  4. Flash Storage Failure Rates From A Large Population
  5. 2014 ACM Turing Award
  6. Greenpeace, Renewable Energy, and Data Centers
  7. The Return to the Cloud
  8. 50 Years of Moore’s Law: IEEE Spectrum Report
  9. Goodbye GoDaddy

2014 11

  1. Why Renewable Energy (Alone) Won’t Fully Solve the Problem
  2. AWS re:Invent Conference
  3. Recovering Cryogenic Refrigeration Energy
  4. August 21, 2014 Computer History Museum Presentation
  5. Data Center Cooling Done Differently
  6. Challenges in Designing at Scale: Formal Methods in Building Robust Distributed Systems
  7. Network Neutrality and the FCC Proposal to Abandon it
  8. Air Traffic Control System Failure & Complex System Testing
  9. Energy Efficiency of Cloud Computing
  10. Optical Archival Storage Technology
  11. The Cloud: Fastest Industry Transition Ever

2013 6

  1. Datacenter Renewable Power Done Right
  2. Solar at Scale: How Big is a Solar Array of 9MW Average Output?
  3. Counting Servers is Hard
  4. Cumulus Networks: A Sneak Preview of One of My Favorite Startups
  5. The Power Failure Seen Around the World
  6. Customer Trust

2012 25

  1. Microserver Market Heats up: Intel Atom S1200 (Centerton) Announcement
  2. Redshift: Data Warehousing at Scale in the Cloud
  3. AMD Announces Server Targeted ARM Part
  4. Google Mechanical Design
  5. Amazon Event in Palo Alto (10/11@5pm)
  6. Glacier: Engineering for Cold Data Storage in the Cloud
  7. Fun with Energy Consumption Data
  8. EBS Provisioned IOPS & Optimized Instance Types
  9. I/O Performance (no longer) Sucks in the Cloud
  10. Why there are Datacenters in NY, Hong Kong, and Tokyo?
  11. Official Report of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission Executive
  12. Visiting the Hanjin Oslo Container Ship
  13. Temprature Management in Data Centers
  14. Urs Holzle @ Open Networking Summit 2012
  15. Amazon Web Services
  16. Power Management of Online Data-Intensive Services
  17. I Love Solar Power But…
  18. Observations on Errors, Corrections, & Trust of Dependent Systems
  19. Communicating Data Beyond the Speed of Light
  20. Perspectives on the Costa Concordia Incident
  21. Studying the Costa Concordia Grounding
  22. Socrata Chief Technical Officer
  23. Amazon DynamoDB: NoSQL in the Cloud
  24. Innovative Datacenter Design: Ishikari Datacenter
  25. ARM V8 Architecture

2011 44

  1. Hyder: Transactional Indexed Record Manager for Shared Flash Storage
  2. High Availability for Cloud Computing Database Systems
  3. Global Netflix Platform: Large Scale Java PaaS Running on AWS
  4. Free Lessons in Industrial Design & Customer Experience
  5. 42: The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything
  6. AWS Startup Challenge 2011
  7. Serious Hard Drive Shortage Expected for at Least 2 Quarters
  8. Presenting Tomorrow at University of Washington
  9. Sprint is Giving Free Customer Service Lessons
  10. Storage Infrastructure Behind Facebook Messages
  11. Microsoft COSMOS at HPTS
  12. Software Define Networking Comes of Age
  13. EMCs Joe Tucci on the Cloud and Big Data
  14. Microsoft Announces Open Source based Cloud Service
  15. We lost a Giant
  16. Changes in Networking Systems
  17. Spot Instances, Big Clusters, & the Cloud at Work
  18. Hortonworks Taking Hadoop to Next Level
  19. SolidFire: Cloud Operators Becomes a Market
  20. Consolidation in Networking: Intel Buys Fulcrum Microsystems
  21. SIGMOD 2011 in Athens
  22. Amazon Technology Open House
  23. Atul Gawande on Performance
  24. What Went Wrong at Fukushima Dai-1
  25. 2011 European Data Center Summit
  26. Guido van Rossum: 21 Years of Python
  27. Software Load Balancing using Software Defined Networking
  28. Open Compute UPS & Power Supply
  29. European Data Center Efficiency Summit
  30. Open Compute Server Design
  31. Open Compute Mechanical System Design
  32. Open Compute Project
  33. Example of Efficient Mechanical Design
  34. Prioritizing Principlas in “On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services”
  35. Intel Atom with ECC in 2012
  36. More Data on Datacenter Air Side Economization
  37. Yahoo! Compute Coop Design
  38. Exploring the Limits of Datacenter Temprature
  39. Dileep Bhandarkar on Datacenter Energy Efficiency
  40. Challenges and Trade-offs in Building a Web-scale Real-time Analytics System
  41. Speeding Up Cloud/Server Applications With Flash Memory
  42. NVIDIA Project Denver: ARM Powered Servers
  43. Interested in Core Database Engine Development?
  44. Google Megastore: The Data Engine Behind GAE

2010 56

  1. GPGPU Sorting
  2. Amazon Route 53 DNS Service
  3. Availability in Globally Distributed Storage Systems
  4. 46MW with Water Cooling at a PUE of 1.10
  5. Very Low-Cost, Low-Power Servers
  6. GPU Clusters in 10 Minutes
  7. HPC in the Cloud with GPGPUs
  8. AWS Compute Cluster #231 on Top 500
  9. Datacenter Power Efficiency
  10. Datacenter Networks are in my Way
  11. AWS Free Tier: 750 hours of EC2 for free
  12. Amazon Web Services Book
  13. Netflix Migration to the Cloud
  14. Scaling AWS Relational Database Service
  15. Overall Data Center Costs
  16. DataCloud 2010: Workshop on Data Intensive Computing in the Clouds Call for Papers
  17. Web-Scale Database
  18. Amazon EC2 for under $15/Month
  19. Gone Boating
  20. Energy Proportional Datacenter Networks
  21. High Performance Computing Hits the Cloud
  22. Long tailed workloads and the return of hierarchical storage management
  23. Hadoop Summit 2010
  24. Velocity 2010
  25. 60,000 servers at Facebook
  26. Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide
  27. Facebook Software Use
  28. SeaMicro Releases Innovative Intel Atom Server
  29. The Drive-by Download Problem
  30. Cloud Data Freedom
  31. Economic Incentives Applied to Web Latency
  32. The New World Order
  33. Netflix on AWS
  34. PUE is Still Broken and I still use it
  35. State of Public Sector Cloud Computing
  36. Solving World Problems With Economic Incentives
  37. When Very Low-Power, Low-Cost Servers Don’t Make Sense
  38. Computer Room Evaporative Cooling
  39. Inter-Datacenter Replication & Geo-Redundancy
  40. Clustrix Database Appliance
  41. Patterson on Cloud Computing
  42. Yahoo! Computing Coop
  43. Facebook Flashcache
  44. One Browser To Rule Them All
  45. VPN over WiMAX
  46. Right Problem but Wrong Approach
  47. High Scale Network Research
  48. Stonebraker on CAP Theorem and Databases
  49. Using a Market Economy
  50. I love eventual consistency but…
  51. Scaling at MySpace
  52. Scaling FarmVille
  53. Scaling Second Life
  54. Private Clouds Are Not The Future
  55. Very Low Power Servers Progress
  56. MapReduce in CACM

2009 105

  1. Networking: The Last Bastion of Mainframe Computing
  2. ACM Science Cloud 2010 Call For Papers
  3. Big Week at Amazon Web Services
  4. AWS Wants You!
  5. Data Center Waste Heat Reclaimation
  6. 2010 the Year of MicroSlice Servers
  7. Is Sandia National Lab’s Red Sky Really Able to Deliver a PUE of 1.035?
  8. ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing
  9. Randy Shoup & John Ousterhout at HPTS 2009
  10. Technologies for Data Intensive Computing
  11. Conversation with Butler Lampson at SOSP 2009
  12. One Size Does Not Fit All
  13. The Cost of Latency
  14. Relational Database Service, More Memory, and Lower Prices
  15. Andy Bechtolsheim at HPTS 2009
  16. Stanford Clean Slate CTO Summit
  17. Jeff Dean: Design Lessons and Advice from Building Large Scale Distributed Systems
  18. Replacing ALL disk with SSD?
  19. You really DO need ECC Memory
  20. VL2: A Scalable and Flexible Data Center Network
  21. Microsoft Chicago is Live
  22. Web Search Using Small Cores
  23. Chillerless Data Center at 95F
  24. Here’s Another Innovative Application of Commodity Hardware
  25. ARM Cortex-A9 SMP Design Announced
  26. Code Splitting for Fast Javascript Application Startup
  27. Linux/Apache on ARM Processors
  28. Successfully Challenging the Server Tax
  29. Changes in the Cloud Computing World
  30. Brief Blogging Hiatus
  31. Search Gets Interesting
  32. HadoopDB: MapReduce over Relational Data
  33. SIGMETRICS/Performance 2009 & USENIX 2009 Keynotes
  34. Why I Enjoy Reading about Engineering Accidents, Failures, & Disasters
  35. Pictures from the Fisher Plaza Data Center Fire
  36. Barbara Liskov 2008 Turing Award Winner
  37. Services Change Everything
  38. Microsoft Bringing 35 Megawatts on-line
  39. ISCA 2009 Keynote II: Internet-Scale Service Infrastructure Efficiency
  40. ISCA 2009 Keynote I: How to Waste a Parallel Computer — Kathy Yelick
  41. PUE and Total Power Usage Efficiency (tPUE)
  42. Erasure Coding and Cold Storage
  43. The SmugMug Tale
  44. Select Past Perspectives Postings
  45. Server under 30W
  46. Amazon Web Services Inport/Export
  47. High-Scale Service Server Counts
  48. 1999 Mitsubishi 3000 VR4 For Sale
  49. AWS Ships Monitoring, Auto Scaling, & Elastic Load Balancing
  50. The Datacenter as a Computer
  51. Next Point of Server Differentiation: Effiiciency at Very High Temprature
  52. Bio-IT World Keynote
  53. Google Dalles Air Side Economizer Picture
  54. Costs of Higher Temperature Data Centers?
  55. Randy Katz on High Scale Data Centers
  56. McKinsey Speculates that Cloud Computing May Be More Expensive than Internal IT
  57. SSD versus Enterprise SATA and SAS disks
  58. Under the Covers of Google App Engine Datastore
  59. Where SSDs Don’t Make Sense in Server Applications
  60. Data Center Efficiency Summit Videos Posted
  61. 32C (90F) in the Data Center
  62. Data Center Efficiency Summit (Posting #4)
  63. HotPower ’09 Call for Papers
  64. Rough Notes: Data Center Efficiency Summit (posting #3)
  65. Rough Notes: Data Center Efficiency Summit
  66. Efficient Data Center Summit
  67. Grand Challenges in Database Self-Management
  68. Cloud Computing Economies of Scale
  69. Microsoft Live Search is Kumo
  70. Erlang Productivity and Performance
  71. 40C (104F) in the Data Center
  72. Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud ’09)
  73. Heterogeneous Computing using GPGPUs: AMD/ATI RV770
  74. Virtualizing GPUs
  75. Heterogeneous Computing using GPGPUs: NVidia GT200
  76. Heterogeneous Computing using GPGPUs and FPGAs
  77. Navigating the Linux Kernel
  78. Seattle Cloud Camp
  79. It’s not (just) about performance
  80. Cost of a Cloud: Research Problems in Data Center Networks
  81. Changes in the Amazon and Microsoft Clouds Yesterday
  82. WTIA: Scaling into the Cloud with Amazon Web Services
  83. FriendFeed use of MySQL
  84. Service Design Best Practices
  85. Google App Engine
  86. FAST 2009 Keynote: AWS S3
  87. Building Scalable Web Apps with Google App Engine
  88. Key Value Stores
  89. High Performance Transaction Systems 2009
  90. AFCOM Western Washington Chapter Meeting
  91. Service Billing is Hard
  92. Berkeley Above the Clouds
  93. Another Step Forward for Utility Computing
  94. Most DoS Attacks are Friendly Fire
  95. Microsoft Delays Chicago, Dublin, and Des Moines Data Centers
  96. Facebook Cassandra Architecture and Design
  97. Slides from Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research
  98. Storage at 2TB for $250
  99. Low Power Amdahl Blades for Data Intensive Computing
  100. Microslice Servers
  101. Recardo Hermann’s Snippets on Software
  102. The Case For Low-Cost, Low-Power Servers
  103. Amazon Web Services & Windows Live Mesh at Crunchies
  104. Joel Spolsky: 12 Steps to Better Code
  105. Google’s Will Power and Data Center Efficiency

2008 122

  1. CACM Interview with Pat Selinger
  2. Wikipedia Architecture
  3. MySpace Architecture and .Net
  4. Bill Gates
  5. High Efficiency SATA Storage
  6. The Cost of Bulk Cold Storage
  7. Resource Consumption Shaping
  8. James Hamilton Joins Amazon.com
  9. Annual Fully Burdened Cost of Power
  10. Microsoft Generation 4 Modular Data Centers
  11. Two Presentations at University of Washington
  12. New Amazon SimpleDB Pricing
  13. Should we Shut Off Servers?
  14. Cost of Power in Large-Scale Data Centers
  15. Google MapReduce Wins TeraSort
  16. Slides from Tony Hoare’s Talk
  17. Pat Selinger IBM Ph.D. Fellowship
  18. Intel’s Solid State Drives
  19. Mesh Services Architecture and Concepts
  20. The Uses of Computers: What’s Past is Merely Prologue — Butler Lampson
  21. Tony Hoare on The Science of Programming
  22. Monitoring at Scale
  23. When SSDs Make Sense in Client Applications
  24. When SSDs Make Sense in Server Applications
  25. Hotnets 2008 Paper
  26. A Small Window into Google’s Data Centers
  27. Measurement and Analysis of Large-Scale Network File System Workloads
  28. Embarrasingly Distributed Cloud Services
  29. Internet-Scale Service Efficiency
  30. Why Blade Servers Aren’t the Answer to All Questions
  31. 1,000,000 IOPS
  32. Degraded Operations Mode
  33. Facebook F8 Conference Notes
  34. Scaling at LucasFilms
  35. Geo-Replication at Facebook
  36. Blogging Hiatus on Perspectives Until Mid-August
  37. Flickr DB Architecture
  38. Foo Camp 2008
  39. Facebook Releases Cassandra as Open Source
  40. Google Megastore
  41. Hadoop Wins TeraSort
  42. Fe-NAND Flash: 10x Durability, 30% Programming Voltage, & 2 Additional Feature Reductions
  43. EcoRAM: NOR Flash to Reduce Memory Power Consumption
  44. Facebook: Needle in a Haystack: Efficient Storage of Billions of Photos
  45. Structure 2008: Put Cloud Computing to Work
  46. Google’s Dr. Kai-Fu Lee on Cloud Computing
  47. Nokia to acquire Symbian and go open source
  48. Google Working on Dynamic Runtime?
  49. Google Seattle Conference on Scalability
  50. Jeff Dean on Google Infrastructure
  51. Scaling LinkedIn
  52. Platform-Based Electronic System-Level (ESL) Synthesis
  53. Google Application Engine Changes
  54. Tribute to Honor Jim Gray
  55. IO2008: Rough notes from Selected Sessions at Google IO Day 2
  56. IO2008: Rough notes from Marissa Mayer Day 2 Keynote at Google IO
  57. Rough notes from Selected Sessions at Google IO Day 1
  58. Petascale SQL DB at Yahoo!
  59. Search Cashback!
  60. Cloud Computing Growth Rate
  61. Erlang and High-Scale System Software
  62. Why I love Full Text Search
  63. Inteviewing Program Managers
  64. Mike Burrows: Early Days at DEC, through Microsoft, to Google
  65. Client-Side Power Consumption
  66. Rough Notes from Yahoo! Web 2.0 Key Note
  67. Laptop SSD Performance Degradation Problems
  68. Jim Gray Systems Lab Opens
  69. Amazon AWS Drops Egress Charges
  70. Windows Live Mesh is Here!
  71. 1,800 MySQL Servers with Two DBAs
  72. Google Application Engine
  73. The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley
  74. Disks, Lies, and Damn Disks
  75. EC2 Gets What It Needed Most
  76. Blog Data Corruption
  77. International Conference on Data Engineering 2008
  78. Golden Shield Project
  79. Diseconomies of Scale
  80. A Couple of Interesting Directions Come Together
  81. Browser-Hosted Software with a “Real” UX
  82. First Containerized Data Center Announcement
  83. The Audiogalaxy Chronicles
  84. Third Party Service Platform From Google?
  85. Hadoop Summit Summary
  86. Hadoop Summit Notes #5 (final): HBase, Rapleave, Hive, Autodesk, Computing in the Cloud, & Future Direction Panel
  87. Hadoop Summit Notes #4: X-tracing Hadoop & Zookeeper
  88. Hadoop Summit Notes #3: JAQL & DryadLINQ
  89. Hadoop Summit Notes #2: PIG
  90. Hadoop Summit
  91. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller
  92. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish
  93. Kinetic Art
  94. Service Free Systems
  95. Rules of Thumb
  96. Why Disks Speeds aren’t Increasing
  97. Flash SSD in 38% of Laptops by 2011
  98. Internet Routing Fragility
  99. Email & Time Management
  100. Bill Gates Last Days Video
  101. Sun Caroline to Compete with Amazon AWS?
  102. Microsoft DreamSpark: Free Professional Developer Tools for Education
  103. Argument for Degraded Operations Mode
  104. HealthVault Service
  105. Downtime: Amazon S3, SimpleDB, SQS, …
  106. Deciphering Trends in Mobile Search
  107. Upgraded to BlackJack I Windows Mobile 6
  108. Amazon Internal Developers Conference
  109. Client-Side Vista Memory Inventory
  110. NAND Flash Random Write Performance Improves
  111. Great Ideas are a Dime a Dozen
  112. Jim Gray Tribute
  113. Founders at Work
  114. It’s been a long year
  115. Seattle Boat Show
  116. Berkeley RAD Lab Retreat
  117. MapReduce: A Minor Step Forward
  118. The Next Big Thing
  119. Changing the World by Spreading the Knowledge of Innovators
  120. Massive Multiplayer Game Automation
  121. Archecture of a Database System
  122. 100,000 IOPS

2007 25

  1. SPECpower Released
  2. See you in January
  3. Cheap Solar Panels
  4. Google Infrastructure
  5. Google: Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal?
  6. Amazon SimpleDB Announced
  7. Google’s Solar Panel Project
  8. Blur the Development/Operations Boundary
  9. Dr. Dobb’s Journal Interview
  10. Here Comes Another Bubble – The Richter Scales
  11. Front Line Analytics at Amazon.com
  12. Server-Side Process Models
  13. Interviewing with insight at Microsoft
  14. Flash Memory SSD Performance
  15. Google Building Custom 10GigE Switches
  16. USENIX LISA
  17. High Performance Transaction Systems
  18. Scaling Web Sites
  19. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Tachi Yamanda
  20. Professional Engineering
  21. Hillary Clinton’s Presentation at Microsft
  22. VLDB 2007 Trip Report
  23. Extremely Large Databases Workshop
  24. Commodity Parts
  25. Welcome to Perspectives