In this web content, the author, Andy Warfield, shares his insights and experiences working on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). He explains that S3 is a large-scale storage system with various components and teams, and it operates as a continuous, evolving system rather than traditional software. Warfield highlights the incredible scale of S3, with millions of hard disks and hundreds of microservices. He emphasizes the importance of managing heat, or the distribution of requests among the disks, to avoid performance issues. Additionally, he discusses the advancements and limitations of hard drives and their impact on S3’s design.
https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2023/07/building-and-operating-a-pretty-big-storage-system.html