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Amazon Scholar John Preskill on the AWS quantum computing effort

Published

5 years ago

September 10, 2020

In June, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that John Preskill, the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, an advisor to the National Quantum Initiative, and one of the most respected researchers in the field of quantum information science, would be joining Amazon’s quantum computing research effort as an Amazon Scholar.

Quantum computing is an emerging technology with the potential to deliver large speedups — even exponential speedups — over classical computing on some computational problems.

John Preskill, the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology and an Amazon Scholar

Credit: Caltech / Lance Hayashida

Where a bit in an ordinary computer can take on the values 0 or 1, a quantum bit, or qubit, can take on the values 0, 1, or, in a state known as superposition, a combination of the two. Quantum computing depends on preserving both superposition and entanglement, a fragile condition in which the qubits’ quantum states are dependent on each other.

The goal of the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, on the Caltech campus, is to develop and build quantum computing technologies and deliver them onto the AWS cloud. At the center, Preskill will be joining his Caltech colleagues Oskar Painter and Fernando Brandao, the heads of AWS’s Quantum Hardware and Quantum Algorithms programs, respectively, and Gil Refael, the Taylor W. Lawrence Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech and, like Preskill, an Amazon Scholar.

Other Amazon Scholars contributing to the AWS quantum computing effort are Amir Safavi-Naeini, an assistant professor of applied physics at Stanford University, and Liang Jiang, a professor of molecular engineering at the University of Chicago.

Amazon Science asked Preskill three questions about the challenges of quantum computing and why he’s excited about AWS’s approach to meeting them.

Q: Why is quantum computing so hard?

What makes it so hard is we want our hardware to simultaneously satisfy a set of criteria that are nearly incompatible.

On the one hand, we need to keep the qubits almost perfectly isolated from the outside world. But not really, because we want to control the computation. Eventually, we’ve got to measure the qubits, and we’ve got to be able to tell them what to do. We’re going have to have some control circuitry that determines what actual algorithm we’re running.

So why is it so important to keep them isolated from the outside world? It’s because a very fundamental difference between quantum information and ordinary information expressed in bits is that you can’t observe a quantum state without disturbing it. This is a manifestation of the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. Whenever you acquire information about a quantum state, there’s some unavoidable, uncontrollable disturbance of the state.

So in the computation, we don’t want to look at the state until the very end, when we’re going to read it out. But even if we’re not looking at it ourselves, the environment is looking at it. If the environment is interacting with the quantum system that encodes the information that we’re processing, then there’s some leakage of information to the outside, and that means some disturbance of the quantum state that we’re trying to process.

Explore our new quantum technologies research section

Quantum computing has the potential to solve computational problems that are beyond the reach of today’s classical computers. Find the latest quantum news, research papers, and more.

So really, we need to keep the quantum computer almost perfectly isolated from the outside world, or else it’s going to fail. It’s going to have errors. And that sounds ridiculously hard, because hardware is never going to be perfect. And that’s where the idea of quantum error correction comes to the rescue.

The essence of the idea is that if you want to protect the quantum information, you have to store it in a very nonlocal way by means of what we call entanglement. Which is, of course, the origin of the quantum computer’s magic to begin with. A highly entangled state has the property that when you have the state shared among many parts of a system, you can look at the parts one at a time, and that doesn’t reveal any of the information that is carried by the system, because it’s really stored in these unusual nonlocal quantum correlations among the parts. And the environment interacts with the parts kind of locally, one at a time.

If we store the information in the form of this highly entangled state, the environment doesn’t find out what the state is. And that’s why we’re able to protect it. And we’ve also figured out how to process information that’s encoded in this very entangled, nonlocal way. That’s how the idea of quantum error correction works. What makes it expensive is in order to get very good protection, we have to have the information shared among many qubits.

Q: Today’s error correction schemes can call for sharing the information of just one logical qubit — the one qubit actually involved in the quantum computation — across thousands of additional qubits. That sounds incredibly daunting, if your goal is to perform computations that involve dozens of logical qubits.

Well, that’s why, as much as we can, we would like to incorporate the error resistance into the hardware itself rather than the software. The way we usually think about quantum error correction is we’ve got these noisy qubits — it’s not to disparage them or anything: they’re the best qubits we’ve got in a particular platform. But they’re not really good enough for scaling up to solving really hard problems. So the solution which at least theoretically we know should work is that we use a code. That is, the information that we want to protect is encoded in the collective state of many qubits instead of just the individual qubits.

We’re interested in what is fundamentally different between classical systems and quantum systems. And I don’t know a statement that more dramatically expresses the difference than saying that there are problems that are easy quantumly and hard classically.

But the alternative approach is to try to use error correction ideas in the design of the hardware itself. Can we use an encoding that has some kind of intrinsic noise resistance at the physical level?

The original idea for doing this came from one of my Caltech colleagues, Alexei Kitaev, and his idea was that you could just design a material that sort of has its own strong quantum entanglement. Now people call these topological materials; what’s important about them is they’re highly entangled. And so the information is spread out in this very nonlocal way, which makes it hard to read the information locally.

Making a topological material is something people are trying to do. I think the idea is still brilliant, and maybe in the end it will be a game-changing idea. But so far it’s just been too hard to make the materials that have the right properties.

A better bet for now might be to do something in-between. We want to have some protection at the hardware level, but not go as far as these topological materials. But if we can just make the error rate of the physical qubits lower, then we won’t need so much overhead from the software protection on top.

Q: For a theorist like you, what’s the appeal of working on a project whose goal is to develop new technologies?

My training was in particle physics and cosmology, but in the mid-nineties, I got really excited because I heard about the possibility that if you could build a quantum computer, you could factor large numbers. As physicists, of course, we’re interested in what is fundamentally different between classical systems and quantum systems. And I don’t know a statement that more dramatically expresses the difference than saying that there are problems that are easy quantumly and hard classically.

The situation is we don’t know much about what happens when a quantum system is very profoundly entangled, and the reason we don’t know is because we can’t simulate it on our computers. Our classical computers just can’t do it. And that means that as theorists, we don’t really have the tools to explain how those systems behave.

I have done a lot of work on these quantum error correcting codes. It was one of my main focuses for almost 15 years. There were a lot of issues of principle that I thought were important to address. Things like, What do you really need to know about noise for these things to work? This is still an important question, because we had to make some assumptions about the noise and the hardware to make progress.

I said the environment looks at the system locally, sort of one part at a time. That’s actually an assumption. It’s up to the environment to figure out how it wants to look at it. As physicists, we tend to think physics is kind of local, and things interact with other nearby things. But until we’re actually doing it in the lab, we won’t really be sure how good that assumption is.

So this is the new frontier of the physical sciences, exploring these more and more complex systems of many particles interacting quantum mechanically, becoming highly entangled. Sometimes I call it the entanglement frontier. And I’m excited about what we can learn about physics by exploring that. I really think in AWS we are looking ahead to the big challenges. I’m pretty jazzed about this.

On November 2, 2020, John Preskill joined Simone Severini, the director of AWS Quantum Computing, for an interview with Simon Elisha, host of the Official AWS Podcast.

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Related Topics:Academics at Amazon AWS Center for Quantum Computing Caltech Quantum computing Quantum error correction Quantum hardware

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Revolutionizing warehouse automation with scientific simulation

Published

5 days ago

August 26, 2025

Deniz Akyildiz

Modern warehouses rely on complex networks of sensors to enable safe and efficient operations. These sensors must detect everything from packages and containers to robots and vehicles, often in changing environments with varying lighting conditions. More important for Amazon, we need to be able to detect barcodes in an efficient way.

Parallel-computing architecture

Our parallel-processing pipeline leverages NVIDIA’s Warp library with custom computation kernels to maximize GPU utilization. By maintaining 3-D objects persistently in GPU memory and updating transforms only when objects move, we eliminate redundant data transfers. We also perform computations only when needed — when, for instance, a sensor parameter changes, or something moves. By these means, we achieve real-time performance.

Visualization methods

Sensor Workbench users can pick sphere- or plane-based visualizations, to see how the positions and rotations of individual barcodes affect performance.

This architecture allows us to perform complex calculations for multiple sensors simultaneously, enabling instant feedback in the form of immersive 3-D visuals. Those visuals represent metrics that barcode-detection machine-learning models need to work, as teams adjust sensor positions and parameters in the environment.

CAD to USD

Our second innovation involved developing a custom CAD-to-OpenUSD pipeline that automatically converts detailed warehouse models into optimized 3-D assets. Our CAD-to-USD conversion pipeline replicates the structure and content of models created in the modeling program SolidWorks with a 1:1 mapping. We start by extracting essential data — including world transforms, mesh geometry, material properties, and joint information — from the CAD file. The full assembly-and-part hierarchy is preserved so that the resulting USD stage mirrors the CAD tree structure exactly.

Related content

Two Alexa AI papers present novel methodologies that use vision and language understanding to improve embodied task completion in simulated environments.

To ensure modularity and maintainability, we organize the data into separate USD layers covering mesh, materials, joints, and transforms. This layered approach ensures that the converted USD file faithfully retains the asset structure, geometry, and visual fidelity of the original CAD model, enabling accurate and scalable integration for real-time visualization, simulation, and collaboration.

OpenUSD as ground truth

The third important factor was our novel approach to using OpenUSD as the ground truth throughout the entire simulation process. We developed custom schemas that extend beyond basic 3-D-asset information to include enriched environment descriptions and simulation parameters. Our system continuously records all scene activities — from sensor positions and orientations to object movements and parameter changes — directly into the USD stage in real time. We even maintain user interface elements and their states within USD, enabling us to restore not just the simulation configuration but the complete user interface state as well.

This architecture ensures that when USD initial configurations change, the simulation automatically adapts without requiring modifications to the core software. By maintaining this live synchronization between the simulation state and the USD representation, we create a reliable source of truth that captures the complete state of the simulation environment, allowing users to save and re-create simulation configurations exactly as needed. The interfaces simply reflect the state of the world, creating a flexible and maintainable system that can evolve with our needs.

Application

With SWB, our teams can now rapidly evaluate sensor mounting positions and verify overall concepts in a fraction of the time previously required. More importantly, SWB has become a powerful platform for cross-functional collaboration, allowing engineers, scientists, and operational teams to work together in real time, visualizing and adjusting sensor configurations while immediately seeing the impact of their changes and sharing their results with each other.

New perspectives

In projection mode, an explicit target is not needed. Instead, Sensor Workbench uses the whole environment as a target, projecting rays from the camera to identify locations for barcode placement. Users can also switch between a comprehensive three-quarters view and the perspectives of individual cameras.

Due to the initial success in simulating barcode-reading scenarios, we have expanded SWB’s capabilities to incorporate high-fidelity lighting simulations. This allows teams to iterate on new baffle and light designs, further optimizing the conditions for reliable barcode detection, while ensuring that lighting conditions are safe for human eyes, too. Teams can now explore various lighting conditions, target positions, and sensor configurations simultaneously, gleaning insights that would take months to accumulate through traditional testing methods.

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Amazon researchers draw inspiration from finite-volume methods and adapt neural operators to enforce conservation laws and boundary conditions in deep-learning models of physical systems.

Looking ahead, we are working on several exciting enhancements to the system. Our current focus is on integrating more-advanced sensor simulations that combine analytical models with real-world measurement feedback from the ARID team, further increasing the system’s accuracy and practical utility. We are also exploring the use of AI to suggest optimal sensor placements for new station designs, which could potentially identify novel configurations that users of the tool might not consider.

Additionally, we are looking to expand the system to serve as a comprehensive synthetic-data generation platform. This will go beyond just simulating barcode-detection scenarios, providing a full digital environment for testing sensors and algorithms. This capability will let teams validate and train their systems using diverse, automatically generated datasets that capture the full range of conditions they might encounter in real-world operations.

By combining advanced scientific computing with practical industrial applications, SWB represents a significant step forward in warehouse automation development. The platform demonstrates how sophisticated simulation tools can dramatically accelerate innovation in complex industrial systems. As we continue to enhance the system with new capabilities, we are excited about its potential to further transform and set new standards for warehouse automation.

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Enabling Kotlin Incremental Compilation on Buck2

Published

5 days ago

August 26, 2025

Iveta Kovalenko

The Kotlin incremental compiler has been a true gem for developers chasing faster compilation since its introduction in build tools. Now, we’re excited to bring its benefits to Buck2 – Meta’s build system – to unlock even more speed and efficiency for Kotlin developers.

Unlike a traditional compiler that recompiles an entire module every time, an incremental compiler focuses only on what was changed. This cuts down compilation time in a big way, especially when modules contain a large number of source files.

Buck2 promotes small modules as a key strategy for achieving fast build times. Our codebase followed that principle closely, and for a long time, it worked well. With only a handful of files in each module, and Buck2’s support for fast incremental builds and parallel execution, incremental compilation didn’t seem like something we needed.

But, let’s be real: Codebases grow, teams change, and reality sometimes drifts away from the original plan. Over time, some modules started getting bigger – either from legacy or just organic growth. And while big modules were still the exception, they started having quite an impact on build times.

So we gave the Kotlin incremental compiler a closer look – and we’re glad we did. The results? Some critical modules now build up to 3x faster. That’s a big win for developer productivity and overall build happiness.

Curious about how we made it all work in Buck2? Keep reading. We’ll walk you through the steps we took to bring the Kotlin incremental compiler to life in our Android toolchain.

Step 1: Integrating Kotlin’s Build Tools API

As of Kotlin 2.2.0, the only guaranteed public contract to use the compiler is through the command-line interface (CLI). But since the CLI doesn’t support incremental compilation (at least for now), it didn’t meet our needs. Alternatively, we could integrate the Kotlin incremental compiler directly via the internal compiler’s components – APIs that are technically accessible but not intended for public use. However, relying on them would’ve made our toolchain fragile and likely to break with every Kotlin update since there’s no guarantee of backward compatibility. That didn’t seem like the right path either.

Then we came across the Build Tools API (KEEP), introduced in Kotlin 1.9.20 as the official integration point for the compiler – including support for incremental compilation. Although the API was still marked as experimental, we decided to give it a try. We knew it would eventually stabilize, and saw it as a great opportunity to get in early, provide feedback, and help shape its direction. Compared to using internal components, it offered a far more sustainable and future-proof approach to integration.

⚠️ Depending on kotlin-compiler? Watch out!

In the Java world, a shaded library is a modified version of the library where the class and package names are changed. This process – called shading – is a handy way to avoid classpath conflicts, prevent version clashes between libraries, and keeps internal details from leaking out.

Here’s quick example:

Unshaded (original) class: com.intellij.util.io.DataExternalizer
Shaded class: org.jetbrains.kotlin.com.intellij.util.io.DataExternalizer

The Build Tools API depends on the shaded version of the Kotlin compiler (kotlin-compiler-embeddable). But our Android toolchain was historically built with the unshaded one (kotlin-compiler). That mismatch led to java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError crashes when testing the integration because the shaded classes simply weren’t on the classpath.

Replacing the unshaded compiler across the entire Android toolchain would’ve been a big effort. So to keep moving forward, we went with a quick workaround: We unshaded the Build Tools API instead. 🙈 Using the jarjar library, we stripped the org.jetbrains.kotlin prefix from class names and rebuilt the library.

Don’t worry, once we had a working prototype and confirmed everything behaved as expected, we circled back and did it right – fully migrating our toolchain to use the shaded Kotlin compiler. That brought us back in line with the API’s expectations and gave us a more stable setup for the future.

Step 2: Keeping previous output around for the incremental compiler

To compile incrementally, the Kotlin compiler needs access to the output from the previous build. Simple enough, but Buck2 deletes that output by default before rebuilding a module.

With incremental actions, you can configure Buck2 to skip the automatic cleanup of previous outputs. This gives your build actions access to everything from the last run. The tradeoff is that it’s now up to you to figure out what’s still useful and manually clean up the rest. It’s a bit more work, but it’s exactly what we needed to make incremental compilation possible.

Step 3: Making the incremental compiler cache relocatable

At first, this might not seem like a big deal. You’re not planning to move your codebase around, so why worry about making the cache relocatable, right?

Well… that’s until you realize you’re no longer in a tiny team, and you’re definitely not the only one building the project. Suddenly, it does matter.

Buck2 supports distributed builds, which means your builds don’t have to run only on your local machine. They can be executed elsewhere, with the results sent back to you. And if your compiler cache isn’t relocatable, this setup can quickly lead to trouble – from conflicting overloads to strange ambiguity errors caused by mismatched paths in cached data.

So we made sure to configure the root project directory and the build directory explicitly in the incremental compilation settings. This keeps the compiler cache stable and reliable, no matter who runs the build or where it happens.

Step 4: Configuring the incremental compiler

In a nutshell, to decide what needs to be recompiled, the Kotlin incremental compiler looks for changes in two places:

Files within the module being rebuilt.
The module’s dependencies.

Once the changes are found, the compiler figures out which files in the module are affected – whether by direct edits or through updated dependencies – and recompiles only those.

To get this process rolling, the compiler needs just a little nudge to understand how much work it really has to do.

So let’s give it that nudge!

Tracking changes inside the module

When it comes to tracking changes, you’ve got two options: You can either let the compiler do its magic and detect changes automatically, or you can give it a hand by passing a list of modified files yourself. The first option is great if you don’t know which files have changed or if you just want to get something working quickly (like we did during prototyping). However, if you’re on a Kotlin version earlier than 2.1.20, you have to provide this information yourself. Automatic source change detection via the Build Tools API isn’t available prior to that. Even with newer versions, if the build tool already has the change list before compilation, it’s still worth using it to optimize the process.

This is where Buck’s incremental actions come in handy again! Not only can we preserve the output from the previous run, but we also get hash digests for every action input. By comparing those hashes with the ones from the last build, we can generate a list of changed files. From there, we pass that list to the compiler to kick off incremental compilation right away – no need for the compiler to do any change detection on its own.

Tracking changes in dependencies

Sometimes it’s not the module itself that changes, it’s something the module depends on. In these cases, the compiler relies on classpath snapshot. These snapshots capture the Application Binary Interface (ABI) of a library. By comparing the current snapshots to the previous one, the compiler can detect changes in dependencies and figure out which files in your module are affected. This adds an extra layer of filtering on top of standard compilation avoidance.

In Buck2, we added a dedicated action to generate classpath snapshots from library outputs. This artifact is then passed as an input to the consuming module, right alongside the library’s compiled output. The best part? Since it’s a separate action, it can be run remotely or be pulled from cache, so your machine doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting of extracting ABI at this step.

If, after all, only your module changes but your dependencies do not, the API also lets you skip the snapshot comparison entirely if your build tool handles the dependency analysis on its own. Since we already had the necessary data from Buck2’s incremental actions, adding this optimization was almost free.

Step 5: Making compiler plugins work with the incremental compiler

One of the biggest challenges we faced when integrating the incremental compiler was making it play nicely with our custom compiler plugins, many of which are important to our build optimization strategy. This step was necessary for unlocking the full performance benefits of incremental compilation, but it came with two major issues we needed to solve.

🚨 Problem 1: Incomplete results

As we already know, the input to the incremental compiler does not have to include all Kotlin source files. Our plugins weren’t designed for this and ended up producing incomplete results when run on just a subset of files. We had to make them incremental as well so they could handle partial inputs correctly.

🚨 Problem 2: Multiple rounds of Compilation

The Kotlin incremental compiler doesn’t just recompile the files that changed in a module. It may also need to recompile other files in the same module that are affected by those changes. Figuring out the exact set of affected files is tricky, especially when circular dependencies come into play. To handle this, the incremental compiler approximates the affected set by compiling in multiple rounds within a single build.

💡Curious how that works under the hood? The Kotlin blog on fast compilation has a great deep dive that’s worth checking out.

This behavior comes with a side effect, though. Since the compiler may run in multiple rounds with different sets of files, compiler plugins can also be triggered multiple times, each time with a different input. That can be problematic, as later plugin runs may override outputs produced by earlier ones. To avoid this, we updated our plugins to accumulate their results across rounds rather than replacing them.

Step 6: Verifying the functionality of annotation processors

Most of our annotation processors use Kotlin Symbol Processing (KSP2), which made this step pretty smooth. KSP2 is designed as a standalone tool that uses the Kotlin Analysis API to analyze source code. Unlike compiler plugins, it runs independently from the standard compilation flow. Thanks to this setup, we were able to continue using KSP2 without any changes.

💡 Bonus: KSP2 comes with its own built-in incremental processing support. It’s fully self-contained and doesn’t depend on the incremental compiler at all.

Before we adopted KSP2 (or when we were using an older version of the Kotlin Annotation Processing Tool (KAPT), which operates as a plugin) our annotation processors ran in a separate step dedicated solely to annotation processing. That step ran before the main compilation and was always non-incremental.

Step 7: Enabling compilation against ABI

To maximize cache hits, Buck2 builds Android modules against the class ABI instead of the full JAR. For Kotlin targets, we use the jvm-abi-gen compiler plugin to generate class ABI during compilation.

But once we turned on incremental compilation, a couple of new challenges popped up:

The jvm-abi-gen plugin currently lacks direct support for incremental compilation, which ties back to the issues we mentioned earlier with compiler plugins.
ABI extraction now happens twice – once during compilation via jvm-abi-gen, and again when the incremental compiler creates classpath snapshots.

In theory, both problems could be solved by switching to full JAR compilation and relying on classpath snapshots to maintain cache hits. While that could work in principle, it would mean giving up some of the build optimizations we’ve already got in place – a trade-off that needs careful evaluation before making any changes.

For now, we’ve implemented a custom (yet suboptimal) solution that merges the newly generated ABI with the previous result. It gets the job done, but we’re still actively exploring better long-term alternatives.

Ideally, we’d be able to reuse the information already collected for classpath snapshot or, even better, have this kind of support built directly into the Kotlin compiler. There’s an open ticket for that: KT-62881. Fingers crossed!

Step 8: Testing

Measuring the impact of build changes is not an easy task. Benchmarking is great for getting a sense of a feature’s potential, but it doesn’t always reflect how things perform in “the real world.” Pre/post testing can help with that, but it’s tough to isolate the impact of a single change, especially when you’re not the only one pushing code.

We set up A/B testing to overcome these obstacles and measure the true impact of the Kotlin incremental compiler on Meta’s codebase with high confidence. It took a bit of extra work to keep the cache healthy across variants, but it gave us a clean, isolated view of how much difference the incremental compiler really made at scale.

We started with the largest modules – the ones we already knew were slowing builds the most. Given their size and known impact, we expected to see benefits quickly. And sure enough, we did.

The impact of incremental compilation

The graph below shows early results on how enabling incremental compilation for selected targets impacts their local build times during incremental builds over a 4-week period. This includes not just compilation, but also annotation processing, and a few other optimisations we’ve added along the way.

With incremental compilation, we’ve seen about a 30% improvement for the average developer. And for modules without annotation processing, the speed nearly doubled. That was more than enough to convince us that the incremental compiler is here to stay.

What’s next

Kotlin incremental compilation is now supported in Buck2, and we’re actively rolling it out across our codebase! For now, it’s available for internal use only, but we’re working on bringing it to the recently introduced open source toolchain as well.

But that’s not all! We’re also exploring ways to expand incrementality across the entire Android toolchain, including tools like Kosabi (the Kotlin counterpart to Jasabi), to deliver even faster build times and even better developer experience.

To learn more about Meta Open Source, visit our open source site, subscribe to our YouTube channel, or follow us on Facebook, Threads, X and LinkedIn.

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A decade of database innovation: The Amazon Aurora story

Published

1 week ago

August 21, 2025

Staff writer

When Andy Jassy, then head of Amazon Web Services, announced Amazon Aurora in 2014, the pitch was bold but metered: Aurora would be a relational database built for the cloud. As such, it would provide access to cost-effective, fast, and scalable computing infrastructure.

In essence, he explained, Aurora would combine the cost effectiveness and simplicity of MySQL with the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases, the kind that firms typically managed on their own. In numbers, Aurora promised five times the throughput (e.g., the number of transactions, queries, read/write operations) of MySQL at one-tenth the price of commercial database solutions, all while offloading costly management challenges and maintaining performance and availability.

AWS re:Invent 2014 | Announcing Amazon Aurora for RDS

Aurora launched a year later, in 2015. Significantly, it decoupled computation from storage, a distinct contrast to traditional database architectures where the two are entwined. This fundamental innovation, along with automated backups and replication and other improvements, enabled easy scaling for both computational tasks and storage, while meeting reliability demands.

“Aurora’s design preserves the core transactional consistency strengths of relational databases. It innovates at the storage layer to create a database built for the cloud that can support modern workloads without sacrificing performance,” explained Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, in 2019.

“To start addressing the limitations of relational databases, we reconceptualized the stack by decomposing the system into its fundamental building blocks,” Vogels said. “We recognized that the caching and logging layers were ripe for innovation. We could move these layers into a purpose-built, scale-out, self-healing, multitenant, database-optimized storage service. When we began building the distributed storage system, Amazon Aurora was born.”

Within two years, Aurora became the fastest-growing service in AWS history. Tens of thousands of customers — including financial-services companies, gaming companies, healthcare providers, educational institutions, and startups — turned to Aurora to help carry their workloads.

1 of 2

Matt Garman, AWS CEO, at AWS re:Invent 2024

In the intervening years, Aurora has continued to evolve to suit the needs of a changing digital landscape. Most recently, in 2024, Amazon announced Aurora DSQL. A major step forward, Aurora DSQL is a serverless approach designed for global scale and enhanced adaptability to variable workloads.

Today, International Data Corporation (IDC) research estimates that firms using Aurora see a three-year return on investment of 434 percent and an operational cost reduction of 42 percent compared to other database solutions.

But what lies behind those figures? How did Aurora become so valuable to its users? To understand that, it’s useful to consider what came before.