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I'm surprised that S3/AWS hasn't blogged or done a white paper about their approach yet. It's been something like 7 years now since they moved away from standar

I'm surprised that S3/AWS hasn't blogged or done a white paper about their approach yet. It's been something like 7 years now since they moved away from standard load balancing. If you think about an object storage platform, much like with YouTube, traditional load balancing is a really bad fit. No two requests are even remotely the same in terms of resource requirements, duration etc.

Ne02ptzero 2y ago
Out of curiosity, any documents on this, even for something else than AWS's S3? I find the idea very interesting
- Twirrim 2y ago
  Nothing specific that I'm aware of. Off the top of my head, and sticking to things that are pretty safe NDA territory, load balancers algorithms typically do things round-robin style, or least current connections, or speed of response etc. They don't know anything about the underlying servers, or the requests, just what they've sent in which direction. If you have multiple load balancers sitting in front of your fleet, they often don't know anything about what each other is doing either. With an Object Storage service like S3, no two GET or PUT requests an LB serves are really the same, or have the same impact. They use different amounts of bandwidth, pull different at different speeds, different latency, require different amounts of CPU for handling or checksumming etc. It didn't used to be too weird to find API servers that were bored stiff, while others were working hard, all while having approximately the same number of requests going to them. Smartphones used to be a nightmare, especially with the number that would be on poor signal quality, and/or reaching internationally. Millions of live connections just sitting there slowly GETing or PUTing requests, using up precious connection resources on web servers, but not much CPU time.
jbnorth 2y ago
The latest deep dive on S3 at reinvent sheds some light on how it’s done. https://youtu.be/NXehLy7IiPM https://youtu.be/NXehLy7IiPM
- Twirrim 2y ago
  Awesome, thanks for the link. Will be interesting to hear how things have developed in the several years since I left.

Ne02ptzero 2y ago

Out of curiosity, any documents on this, even for something else than AWS's S3? I find the idea very interesting

Twirrim 2y ago
Nothing specific that I'm aware of. Off the top of my head, and sticking to things that are pretty safe NDA territory, load balancers algorithms typically do things round-robin style, or least current connections, or speed of response etc. They don't know anything about the underlying servers, or the requests, just what they've sent in which direction. If you have multiple load balancers sitting in front of your fleet, they often don't know anything about what each other is doing either. With an Object Storage service like S3, no two GET or PUT requests an LB serves are really the same, or have the same impact. They use different amounts of bandwidth, pull different at different speeds, different latency, require different amounts of CPU for handling or checksumming etc. It didn't used to be too weird to find API servers that were bored stiff, while others were working hard, all while having approximately the same number of requests going to them. Smartphones used to be a nightmare, especially with the number that would be on poor signal quality, and/or reaching internationally. Millions of live connections just sitting there slowly GETing or PUTing requests, using up precious connection resources on web servers, but not much CPU time.

jbnorth 2y ago

The latest deep dive on S3 at reinvent sheds some light on how it’s done. https://youtu.be/NXehLy7IiPM https://youtu.be/NXehLy7IiPM

Twirrim 2y ago
Awesome, thanks for the link. Will be interesting to hear how things have developed in the several years since I left.