Land near power plants is set to become a hot commodity due to AI. Several data center operators, including AWS and Microsoft, have explored nuclear-powered options for their operations. While most projects are looking to build on the land surrounding nuclear plants, some projects, like Microsoft's, are exploring the idea of installing tiny modular plants to power existing data centers. While small modular reactors are not yet ready for production, there are still more than 400 reactors around the globe to collocate with.

AWS Lambda supports trillions of invocations per month for millions of customers. It has components like Firecracker, a lightweight virtual machine manager, which is used to secure and fast-boot microVMs for running functions.

Elastic Block Store (EBS) at AWS has evolved from simple shared drives to a massive, distributed SSD system delivering over 140 trillion operations daily. This post shares key lessons learned over the years, emphasizing the importance of incremental improvements, comprehensive instrumentation, and the power of constraints to drive innovation. It also discusses how a team tackled performance challenges by addressing the entire system stack, from the hypervisor to the network, and ultimately by building their own SSDs optimized for EBS.

Misconfigured AWS S3 buckets can be hacked through various means, such as examining HTTP responses, using search engines, and bruteforcing common keywords. Developers can test for misconfigurations by testing for list, read, write, and download permissions, examining Access Control Lists (ACLs), and checking for missing file type restrictions and S3 versioning. Knowing how to do this is important to actually secure your S3 buckets properly against unknown attackers.

The shift away from permissive open source licensing has motivated the majority of Redis users to consider alternatives. Many are considering or testing Valkey, a fork of Redis managed by the Linux Foundation and backed by AWS, Google, Oracle, and others that was prompted by the decision to switch licenses. Redis claims the decision to change licenses was made to prevent AWS and Google from charging for Redis in their database services without paying for it. It anticipated the fork, as it was exactly what Amazon did with Elasticsearch, but the company believes it is better for them to be able to innovate freely without the fear of its code being taken by cloud service providers and resold.