Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a virtualized server product that provides the user with scalable compute infrastructure. EC2 was created in 2006 as one of the first three AWS services along with S3 and Simple Queueing Service. Since then, EC2 has provided the core server infrastructure for many of the companies that have been built in the cloud. 

A large scale virtualization product requires its engineers to have a deep understanding of scheduling and multitenancy. In previous shows, we have touched on subjects such as hypervisors, the noisy neighbor problem, the cold start problem, and other aspects of multitenant infrastructure. To make EC2 successful, these issues must be continuously revisited and resolved at different areas of the stack.

Dave Brown joined the EC2 team in 2007, and now leads the EC2 Compute, Networking, and Load Balancing teams as a Vice President. Dave joins the show to discuss the history of EC2 and the canonical problems of virtualized server infrastructure.