Disclaimer: ex-AWS. Not for reproduction.<p>> There are a lot of distributed systems books I love, but I haven't found an accessible introduction I particularly like yet.<p>I'd highly recommend Martin Kleppmann's Desgining Data Intensive Applications [0] as an introductory book on distributed systems.<p>> Here's Jaso Sorenson describing the design of DynamoDB<p>For the uninitiated, Jaso played a key role in S3's evolution and was one of S3's founding engineers along with the then CTO and now Distinguished Eng, Alan Vermeulen (who's probably Jeff Dean of Amazon), who btw is an expert speaker. Such a shame folks outside of Amazon don't get to see his numerous talks. Absolute legends.<p>> Colm MacCarthaigh talking about some principles for building control planes.<p>Jaso also built "one of the most complex distributed systems ever built at AWS", what then later formed inspiration for AWS HyperPlane and the NetworkLoadBalancer by a team led by Colm, who inturn, was a founding eng with Route53 (first-ever 100% uptime public service at AWS?), VPC, and CloudFront among other very fancy security things.<p>> I've (Marc Brooker) been doing this stuff for 15 years in one way or another, and still feel like I'm scratching the surface.<p>Well, he's being humble here. Marc's internal wiki pages on various designs he's come up with over the years for AWS are absolute gold mines, in that they explain his thought process, his experimentation, and his research with existing publications. Along with Colm (and a few others), he's is a prolific speaker internally at AWS with some of his talks ranked in the top 10 consistently. His recent contributions with EC2/EBS and Lambda mean he's worked with the largest and most complicated distributed systems there ever has been at AWS (imo, of course).<p>There are others like Eric Brandwine (Security), James Hamilton (Data Centers), Peter Vosshall (Silk, EC2, and Architecture), Becky Weiss (VPC and Lambda), David Yancek (IoT, NoSQL), Andrew Certain (DB), Tim Rath (DB), Stefano Stefani (DB, Warehouse, AI), Brad M (S3), Nafea B (Hardware), MSW (EC2/OS), A Ligouri (EC2/OS), Hall Cary (Builder Tools), Marvin T (Kinesis) et al who don't get a mention in the blog post but have been every bit gigantic in their contributions at AWS since forever. The recent recruits at the top rungs of eng at AWS have considerable pedigree coming in, as well. Exciting times, for sure.<p>I wish they'd release those internal videos (and CoEs) on a case-to-case basis to public. That'd go a long way in contributing to the distributed systems literature... apart from resuming to write blogs and papers abt their systems [1] like the NetEng/Route53 team once did.<p>[0] <a href="https://dataintensive.net" rel="nofollow">https://dataintensive.net</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19290069" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19290069</a><p>(Opinions my own. Facts presented may not be accurate. Zero intention to cause hurt and anguish.)