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AWS Nitro SSD

Definition

AWS Nitro SSD is Amazon's in-house custom SSD, with its firmware/hardware stack tailored specifically to the needs of systems/aws-ebs (and IO-intensive EC2 instances). Announced on the AWS Blog: "AWS Nitro SSD – High Performance Storage for your I/O-Intensive Applications".

Why it exists (per Marc Olson, 2024)

The 2013 blueprint for EBS "ended up looking nothing like what EBS looks like today" — one example is that the team "never would have imagined that Amazon would one day build its own SSDs." Custom silicon is the logical endpoint of the EBS design arc: having systematically stripped queues out of the OS, hypervisor, and network via systems/nitro + systems/srd, the remaining variance sits in the storage media itself, where off-the-shelf SSD controllers couldn't be tuned for EBS's access patterns or tail-latency targets. Building the SSD lets EBS co-design media + firmware + wire protocol end-to-end.

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