That business was … Spinning up VMs on-demand and shutting them down when the job was done was nothing short of magic.What started as an alliance with Annapurna Labs quickly graduated into an acquisition. Billy and Nafea wanted to trek Annapurna just before launching the …
By offloading the hypervisor and networking stack to a specialized hardware accelerator called Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), Amazon EC2 would function at a higher speed and lower cost. The secret sauce behind the bare metal instances is Project Nitro. The company develops microprocessors that allow fast data traffic for low power computing servers and storage servers for organizations.What you see here scratches the surfacePitchBook’s comparison feature gives you a side-by-side look at key metrics for similar companies. This marked the official entry of Amazon into the silicon industry challenging the dominance of Intel and AMD.With cloud providers poised to build custom silicon, Annapurna Labs is turning out to be Amazon’s secret weapon. This technology has emerged as a threat to Intel and AMD.The original avatar of cloud infrastructure was launching and accessing virtual machines on a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Billy and Nafea wanted to trek Annapurna just before launching the startup. It paved the way to the historical partnership between VMware and AWS, which were fierce competitors in the cloud market.The C3 instance family announced in 2013 saw the debut of custom chips in Amazon EC2. Both are incredibly secretive about their research and product roadmaps. Annapurna Labs Alpine AL5140 @1.7GHz (Quad Core ARM Cortex-A15) ASUS GT-AC9600 , Gigabyte D120-S3G Server They were backed by a custom network interface that delivered faster bandwidth and throughput.The timing couldn’t have been better for Avigdor, Billy and Nafea.
Vice President, Engineering & Co-Founder: 1 Former Executive. James Hamilton, the man behind the massive data center rollouts at AWS, didn’t find AMD delivering the expected performance.The powerful combination of wafer-thin KVM software tightly coupled with an ASIC is dubbed as Project Nitro. But both C3 and C4 were still running the traditional hypervisor on top of an Intel Xeon processor.Andy Jassy, CEO at AWS, announced AWS Inferentia at re:Invent 2018. Prior to that, Janakiram spent over 10 years at Microsoft Corporation where he was involved in selling, marketing and evangelizing the Microsoft application platform and tools. Eventually, AWS found that Xen has many limitations that could slow down the rapid growth potential of Amazon EC2. Though the duo couldn't start the trek, they ended up calling their new-found company as Annapurna.Project Nitro became the core technology building block to run VMware on AWS.