At least in the organizations I'm a part of this isn't true. We do look for both specialists and generalists, and focus on experience and how it could apply.

It's difficult to innovate by just repeating what's been done before. But everything you learn along the way helps shape that innovation.

Instance storage can be a good option depending on your workload, but definitely has limitations. There's huge value in separating the lifecycle of storage from compute, and EBS provides higher durability than instance storage as well.

There are no operating system limitations that I'm aware of, however. I was just able to launch a Windows m6idn.2xlarge to verify.

Thanks for checking. I realize now that I wasn’t clear in my original comment.

My use case was to bring up a Windows instance using instance storage as the root device instead using of EBS which is the default root device.

I wanted to run some benchmarks directly on drive C:\ — backed by an NVMe SSD-based instance store — because of an app that will only install to drive C:\, but it seems there’s no way to do this.

The EC2 docs definitely gave me the impression that instance storage is not supported on Windows as a root volume.

Here’s one such note from the docs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/RootDevi...

”Windows instances do not support instance-store backed root volumes.”

Really nice that you are engaging with the comments here on HN as the article’s author.

(For others who may not be aware, msolson = Marc Olson)

Ah yes. Instance store root volumes are what we originally launched EC2 with--EBS came along 2 years later, but as data volumes only at first, with boot from EBS I think a year after that. There's a lot less fragility, and really it's just easier for our customers to create an EBS snapshot based AMI.

Before we launched the c4 instance family the vast majority of instance launches were from EBS backed AMIs, so we decided to remove a pile of complexity, and beginning with the c4 instance family, we stopped supporting instance storage root volumes on new instance families.

A picture can be worth way more than a thousand words, but sometimes you have to iterate through a thousand pictures to find the one that tells the right story, or helps you ask the right question!

Thanks for the comment, and you're right, modern computers do have a much better architecture! As I was laying out the story I was thinking about what it looked like when we started. I'll clarify that in the image caption that it's from that era.

We may be going full circle with consumer systems being so light for lanes under PCI-e gen5!

There's usually enough for a GPU, SSD or two... and that's about it. I don't like having to spend so much for fast IO, dangit.

Can sometimes find boards that do switching to appease :/

I'd say the lack of flexible boards isn't really about lane count.

A B650(E) board has enough lanes to give you a fast GPU slot, four CPU x4 slots running at 8-16GB/s each, and four chipset x1 slots running at 2GB/s each.

Put your gpu on chipset 8 lane and use a pcie to nvme hub to get upto 7 nvmes

I hadn't even gotten into NICs and such yet, though! There was a time when I didn't have to play this game of Tetris

That time was probably when SLI/crossfire was still around so high-end consumer boards had a reason to include plenty of slots for 3 GPUs.

The industry has made a market segment for this/largely ignored it, 'HEDT'. I'd say this is evidence to your point, GPUs being the motivator. I'm starting to think I'm the only one still using add-in NICs, sound cards, or bifurcation.

The ATX spec allows for 7 or fewer physical slots. That's not what's letting me down!

How many lanes are actually available and their division changes over time. Everything from USB to SATA has internally been moving to PCI-e, there's more 'internal consumption', too.

Gen5 is kind of a victim of success. Each individual lane is very fast, but providing them to a fair number of add-in cards/devices isn't practical. Simply physically, but also bandwidth between lanes.

Pretty much all of gen4 is nice, those systems are perfectly viable. More lanes that were slower offered me more utility. It's multi-faceted, I overstate it too. I like hyperbole :)

Cool, yep this is just a minor detail and doesn't change what the article itself conveys.

Thanks for a very informative article. It would be interesting have more detail about how EBS achieved a strong culture around quality and system resilience. Maybe a future post?