[anan0s]

I'm a bit skeptical on the fact that such companies do not disclose their custom infrastructure design. So their value is both in hardware optimizations as well as software ones ?

being a grad student myself, I'm wondering if we'll ever see any specific technical aspects on infrastructures that could drive systems research and provide real problems to be attacked...

[XorNot]

I'm skeptical that there's anything that innovative going on behind the veil.

I suspect if you had access you would look at a whole bunch of evolutionary improvements and probably trace them back to which papers you've seen it sort of mentioned in.

Probably not as much custom silicon as the article implies either, simply because on the scale of things Amazon is not a semiconductor company and Intel pretty unambiguously own the cutting edge there.

[wmf]

Facebook reveals their infrastructure through the Open Compute Project since it can't compete against their core business.