CONTINUOUS REINVENTION: A BRIEF HISTORY OF BLOCK STORAGE AT AWS

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

This post provides a history of Elastic Block Store, one of AWS's foundational services. It covers queuing theory, the importance of comprehensive instrumentation, and the value of incrementalism versus radical changes. EBS's development team's approach, which was to make a series of incremental improvements over time, allowed them to develop customer value sooner and course correct as they learned more about changing customer workloads. They were able to make significant improvements to the service without taking it online.