Top all-time · #133
Werner Vogels
Personal blog · allthingsdistributed.comsystemsprogramming
Werner Vogels writes All Things Distributed, a personal blog at allthingsdistributed.com about systems and programming. Since 2007, 305 different Hacker News readers have linked it 469 times, most often “Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-Value Store (2007) [pdf]”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Werner Vogels' blog for AWS architecture write-ups and papers, including Dynamo, Aurora and S3, and for his CTO and serverless essays. Commenters cite its posts as primary sources on how AWS services work.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- Commenters call the Dynamo paper excellent and say the Lambda PR/FAQ is worth a read; others recommend the S3 posts and the Aurora design article.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Werner Vogels on building scalable and robust distributed systems
Most-linked posts?
- Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-Value Store (2007) [pdf]17 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2011-06-23
- Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-Value Store (2007) [pdf]13 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2019-10-01
- Amazon's Dynamo10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2007-10-03
- Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3 (2023)10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2023-07-27
- Working Backwards10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2009-01-28
- /files/p1041-verbitski.pdf9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2018-02-14
- Modern Applications at AWS9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-08-28
- The Different CTO Roles (2007)8 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2019-04-12
- Eventually Consistent - Revisited7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2008-12-23
- Working Backwards6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-06-29
What Hacker News says?
This makes me think of the Amazon CTO's analysis from Modern Applications on AWS where they push Serverless as the future: "...we anticipate that there will soon be a whole generation of developers who have never touched a server and only write business logic." Honestly, which sounds more like a nightmare than a dream. Knowing what your software runs on and how it works is critical if you want to create REALLY GREAT…
Comment linking /2019/08/modern-applications-at-aws.html
on “Serverless: slower and more expensive”Submitted Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS as a story · 385 points
HN discussionThe big innovation of aurora is they decoupled the compute from the storage [1]. Both compute and storage need to auto scale, but compute is the really important one that is hardest. Aurora serverless scales the compute automatically by keeping warm pools of db capacity around [2]. This is great for spiky traffic without degraded performance. 1. https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/p1041-verbitski.p... 2. http…
Comment linking /files/p1041-verbitski.pdf
on “You Are Not Google (2017)”Submitted Amazon DynamoDB – a Fast and Scalable NoSQL Database Service from AWS as a story · 296 points
HN discussion"DuckLabs is joining AWS as a subsidiary" https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/08/duckdb-and-the-...
Comment linking /2026/08/duckdb-and-the-changing-physics-of-analytics.html?trk=feed_main-feed-card_feed-article-content
on “AWS Acquires DuckLabs”Submitted Amazon’s distributed computing manifesto (1998) as a story · 244 points
HN discussionMore details on the acquisition here: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/08/duckdb-and-the-... DuckLabs will be an AWS subsidiary, not subsumed into AWS itself.
Comment linking /2026/08/duckdb-and-the-changing-physics-of-analytics.html
on “AWS Acquires DuckLabs”Submitted An AWS Region is coming to South Africa as a story · 220 points
HN discussionPer Werner's blog post [1] "in the coming months, Amazon S3 will introduce an option that will allow customers to seamlessly move data between Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier based on data lifecycle policies." 1. http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/08/amazon-glacier.h...
Comment linking /2012/08/amazon-glacier.html
on “Amazon Glacier”Submitted In S3 simplicity is table stakes as a story · 200 points
HN discussionA couple of my favorite blogs - http://antirez.com/ - https://martin.kleppmann.com/archive.html - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing - https://ma.tt/ - https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/ - https://jvns.ca/ - https://www.johndcook.com/blog - http://feross.org/ - https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/ - https://blog.andrewcantino.com/ - https://nickcraver.com/blog/ - https://blog.acolyer.org - https://blog.coding…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted An AWS Region is coming to France as a story · 183 points
HN discussionThe Dynamo Paper. http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp... One of the best practical "How can this improve our business?" technical papers, and an excellent introduction to reading papers.
Comment linking /files/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf
on “Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?”Submitted Lessons from 10 Years of Amazon Web Services as a story · 169 points
HN discussion> The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work. I think that's a really sad and cynical view. I assume you don't spend 16 hours a day writing code. I assume you have hobbies and other interests. For some people, educating others about their favorite topics is their hobby. Writing about their projects is their hobby.…
Comment linking /
on “Most tech content is bullshit”Submitted The Incredible Power of the Amazon EC2 Cluster GPU Instances as a story · 167 points
HN discussiondynamodb is the spiritual successor of sdb. sdb is build on the same principles outlined in the dynamo paper: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sos...
Comment linking /files/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf
on “The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon”Submitted Reinventing virtualization with the AWS Nitro System as a story · 146 points
HN discussionDon't know if they still use it (I suspect so!) but at least as of 2015 Amazon was using a homebrewed deployment service called Apollo, which could spin up a VM from an internally developed Linux image then populate it with all the software and dependencies needed for a single service. It later inspired AWS CodeDeploy which does the same thing. I remember it being pretty irritating to use, though, since it wasn't pa…
Comment linking /2014/11/apollo-amazon-deployment-engine.html
on “Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?”Submitted Welcoming Adrian Cockcroft to the AWS Team as a story · 145 points
HN discussionThanks for the kind words. I don't consider myself a "brilliant" engineer. More of an experienced engineer. I've been building software products for 30+ years. I think the role of the CTO varies based on the scale of the company. This article on the types of CTOs is useful framing: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/07/the_different_c...
Comment linking /2007/07/the_different_cto_roles.html
on “A CTO should be technical”Submitted No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3 as a story · 137 points
HN discussionWhat's incredible (and frankly horrifying) in this blog post is the complete lack of anything pertaining to what /kind/ of company the CTO works at. Surely, that must be important; a large company that sells a non technical product may need a very different CTO from an enterprise software company, who may need a very different one from a quantitative trading find. Along those lines, I find the lack of connection to…
Comment linking /2007/07/the_different_cto_roles.html
on “A CTO should be technical”Submitted Under the Hood of Amazon EC2 Container Service as a story · 136 points
HN discussionThanks! Certainly multi-AZ setups are not magical. I just wanted to know how it's now done on-prem, what are the tools, solutions, approaches. Doing this in a cost-effective way for 1000 servers likely takes different tools than doing this at a major cloud provider scale. One thing that's more "magical" in AWS is S3. Their architecture is impressive, see e.g. https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2021/04/s3-strong-co…
Comment linking /2021/04/s3-strong-consistency.html
on “German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice”Submitted Just make it scale: An Aurora DSQL story as a story · 134 points
HN discussionThe AWS Lambda PR/FAQ was released late last year - worth a read https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2024/11/aws-lambda-turn...
Comment linking /2024/11/aws-lambda-turns-10-a-rare-look-at-the-doc-that-started-it.html
on “Writing a good design document”Submitted Diving Deep on S3 Consistency as a story · 126 points
HN discussionThe dynamodb paper is pretty approachable and provides alot of context. http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp...
Comment linking /files/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf
on “Ask HN: What are some interesting papers in CS for a beginner?”Submitted A one-size-fits-all database doesn't fit anyone as a story · 111 points
HN discussion
