October 2025

Agenda

5:30 Doors open
6:00 Welcome and Latest from AWS
6:15 Talk 1 - Details coming soon
6:45 Food, Drinks and Networking
7:15 Talk 2 - Details coming soon
7:45 More networking
8:30 Close

Catering this month is supplied by Little Phat Rolls.

AWS Data Centre Networking - Hugh Fisher
An overview of the network architecture inside a modern data centre.
Is "north-south" vs "east-west" some kind of Feng shui? Why is the
Ethernet specification now more than two thousand pages? What are EFA and Nitro power-ups for EC2 instances?

More seriously, how should we change the way we design and build
systems in the cloud? AWS datacentres are different to the Internet
and LANs we are usually taught about and some of our assumptions and
best practices can be reconsidered. If tail latency matters for your
web applications or low latency for your machine learning system, what
AWS capabilities can help? How much can we depend on the AWS
infrastructure for redundancy and failover? I can't provide definitive
answers, but can give you ideas to think about.

Hugh Fisher
Hugh (or Hugo) Fisher is a long time network administrator
and developer of networked applications. (Don't ask him about USENET
or MBONE unless you have a lot of time to spare.) He reads Amazon
whitepapers and watches re:Invent videos in an attempt to keep up to
date with what's happening with the modern Internet.