Amazon S3: Lessons Learned from 17 Years of Building a Massive Storage System

This post summarizes Andy Warfield's keynote address at USENIX FAST ‘23, where he discussed the three perspectives on scale involved in building and operating a storage system the size of Amazon S3. Warfield shares his six-year experience at S3, covering everything from hard disk mechanics to customer experience. He details technical challenges like managing millions of hard drives, addressing hotspots, and leveraging replication and erasure coding for durability and performance. The article also highlights the importance of 'ownership', empowering teams to make decisions and foster innovation. A valuable read for anyone interested in large-scale distributed storage systems.