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DeSantis tells the story of how original EC2 performance was subject to jitter, as a result of the virtualisation mechanism. To solve this, they built AWS Nitro, the hardware virtualisation platform that underpins the whole AWS cloud.

The latest edition of compsci classic "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" covers the architecture of Nitro and the AWS Graviton hardware. Neat.

Dave Brown, VP, AWS Compute & ML Services takes the stage to talk about Graviton, Amazon's custom ARM-based chip which delivers excellent price/performance compute on AWS.

As well as custom silicon, Graviton chips are cooled in a custom way too - the lid of the chip is removed, and the heat sink applied directly. This improves cooling efficiency and reduces power usage.

Graviton 4 also provided a coherent link between cores, to enable 192 vCPU cores, but this introduced new latency paths. Graviton 5 improves that, doubling the number of cores, and increasing the L3 cache by 5.3x. These are now available in preview, as part of M9g EC2 instances.

A speaker from Apple tells us they've started using their language Swift to develop backend systems, and deploy these to Graviton. Amazon Linux now has a native toolchain for developing Swift, the first distribution to provide one.

Brown is back, talking through the history of AWS Lambda, initially conceived of in 2013. A couple of years ago, the Lambda and EC2 teams were brought together. It's that coming together that led to the release this week of AWS Lambda Managed Instances.