In an afternoon keynote at AWS:reInvent 2023 in Las Vegas, Dave Brown, VP of Amazon EC2 Networking and Compute Services, presented the latest innovations in AWS core networking infrastructure, VPC networking, data center networking for AI/ML, security, and global connectivity.
Some highlights:
- AWS now has over 30 regions in operation, with four new regions expected to come online soon: New Zealand, Canada, Thailand, and Malaysia.
- There are now 35 AWS Local Zones in operation and 19 more will be coming online soon. First launched in Los Angeles three years ago, the initial use case was cloud-based video production for the media industry.
- There are now 130 AWS Direct Connect locations, all supporting 100 Gbps fiber interconnects
- There are now 600 PoPs for Amazon CloudFront, its content delivery network service
- AWS Nitro has been fundamental to EC2 and network bandwidth continues to rise at a rapid clip. The lates P5 instances using NVIDIA H100 can access up to 3200 Gbps. The AI/ML workloads will continue to scale up. Anthropic Claude already uses 10,000 GPUs.
- New network topologies for connecting all these GPUs are needed. AWS calls thse “Ultra Clusters” and is moving beyond CLOS architecture.
- AWS is introducing an Instance Topology API to help customers understand how many hops are between their instances across an Ultracluster. The API provides info on where your instance are located.
- AWS has developed its own routing solution based on its own Scalable Reliable Datagram protocol. This has been running internally for several years, and on certain high-end customer instances. AWS is announcing that SRD is now available on all Nitro instances. Among its capabilities, flow limits expand from 5 Gbps to 25 Gbps
- The AWS Cloud WAN service continues to grow while adding features. The service allows enterprises to create network segments. Globla network WANs can be automated and managed from a single portal. The latest capability is AWS Cloud WAN Tunnel-less Connect.
