This retrospective by Marc Olson offers a detailed look at the evolution of AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS), tracing its journey from a simple network-attached block storage service launched in 2008 to a massive, distributed SSD-based system now handling over 140 trillion operations daily. The post highlights key lessons learned in performance engineering, organizational structure, and continuous incremental improvement, illustrating how EBS overcame challenges like noisy neighbors, hardware transitions from HDDs to SSDs, and the need for robust measurement and instrumentation to deliver ever-lower latency and higher reliability for AWS customers.

https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2024/08/continuous-reinvention-a-brief-history-of-block-storage-at-aws.html