Much of the the internet runs on Elastic Block Storage. It's the default (and in most cases, required) storage layer for every EC2 instance running in AWS. This article by @molson was a delightful read on its history and engineering challenges.

Nov 6, 2025 · 2:53 PM UTC

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Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS

Marc Olson, a long-time Amazonian, discusses the evolution of EBS, highlighting hard-won lessons in queueing theory, the importance of comprehensive instrumentation, and the value of incrementalism...

allthingsdistributed.com
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Replying to @BenjDicken @molson
> We made a small change to our software that staged new writes onto that SSD, allowing us to return completion back to your application, and then flushed the writes to the slower hard disk asynchronously. This doesn't sound like a good approach for achieving high durability for the stored data. If the local SSD breaks, then applications (such as databases) lose recently written and properly fsync'ed data to EBS. This also may lead to inconsistencies and corruption of the stored data.
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Replying to @BenjDicken @molson
Right, Ben, that's a crucial aspect of cloud infrastructure, isn't it? Elastic Block Storage is indeed the backbone, no doubt.
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