Continuous reinvention - a brief history of block storage at AWS

A really consistent lesson at AWS is that system performance issues almost universally span a lot of layers in our hardware and software stack, but even great engineers tend to have jobs that focus their attention on specific narrower areas. While the much celebrated ideal of a “full stack engineer” is valuable, in deep and complex systems it’s often even more valuable to create cohorts of experts who can collaborate and get really creative across the entire stack and all their individual areas of depth.

• Marc Olson

A long and worthwhile throughout post on the history of the design of amazon's EBS network file storage.