Series
The Service Manual
AWS, one service at a time: where each one came from, how it's actually built, where it creaks, and why the bill looks the way it does. Part of Under the Hood.
Under the Hood · The Service Manual
How S3 Actually Works
S3 stores more than 500 trillion objects and answers over 200 million requests a second, on an API that has barely changed in twenty years. Between your PUT and the disk sit erasure codes, a formally checked storage node, and one of the largest distributed systems ever run.
Read articleHow IAM Actually Works
Every AWS API call is an HTTPS request carrying an HMAC signature, evaluated against a stack of JSON documents in a few milliseconds. IAM does this over a billion times a second, and the answer it gives decides everything else that happens in the cloud.
Coming soon