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How CloudTune generates forecasts for the Amazon Store

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On what are known as game days to teams inside Amazon, millions of virtual “customers” log on to the Amazon Store to search for items, browse product pages, load shopping carts, and check out as if they were real customers hunting for bargains during a sale such as Prime Day.

“It’s like a fire drill, a planned practice,” said Molly McElheny, a principal technical program manager in Central Reliability Engineering at Amazon. McElheny is responsible for helping to oversee those game days, which her organization runs at strategically chosen times in advance of big sales. Their goal? Make sure the Amazon Store and the many teams who help it run smoothly are ready ahead of time for potentially massive spikes in traffic.

That planned practice draws on forecasts of traffic and loads on Amazon services generated by CloudTune, a system that serves as a communications vehicle between the teams who plan events such as Prime Day and service teams that own infrastructure components and help run the Amazon Store.

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CloudTune Forecasting emanated from Amazon’s central economics team back in 2015 as an improved methodology for capacity planning to handle major events such as Prime Day and Black Friday, explained Oleksiy Mnyshenko, a senior manager and economist at Amazon.

“These events have large peak-to-mean spreads,” he noted. “This means we need to proactively model the expected peak load and continuously assess our AWS capacity needs to support it.”

Demand forecasting

The CloudTune Forecasting system has expanded over the years from generating peak computation-load forecasts one year in advance in the United States to a series of forecasts that range from per-week forecasts up to two years out to per-minute forecasts several months into the future. In addition, those forecasts — which are continually refreshed with new data — are now also generated for a wide variety of Amazon teams and regions around the world.

While the need for specific regional forecasts may be obvious — a Mother’s Day sale forecast in the United States will not be relevant for a Diwali sale in India — many unique service teams that support the Amazon Store also rely on these forecasts.

When you go to the Amazon Store, … in the background, there are thousands of software systems that together constitute what the experience is, and all of these systems and teams owning them need to be ready for these peak events.

One team may be responsible for the home page in a specific region, whereas another team is responsible for the shopping cart experience there, and yet another handles the checkout process. Each team experiences traffic differently and, necessarily, consumes AWS computing power differently. Over time, teams at Amazon have collaborated to improve CloudTune forecasts to be useful for each of those teams and their specific concerns.

“When you go to the Amazon Store, it feels very seamless as you go from searching for something to navigating to details about the product to then checking out, but in the background, there are thousands of software systems that together constitute what the experience is, and all of these systems and teams owning them need to be ready for these peak events,” Mnyshenko said.

In the early years, CloudTune forecasts were geared primarily to help service teams know how much computational capacity they needed for peak events. Since then, improvements have focused on differentiating across teams and regions. As the Amazon Store continued to grow, it became important to extend demand outlook to a two-years-out aggregate forecast per region to help inform decisions for AWS related to computing power, networking, and data center planning.

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“A data center is not built in a day,” noted Chunpeng Wang, a senior applied scientist at Amazon who works on the CloudTune forecast team. “Our forecasts are an important input into long-term capacity planning for AWS.”

What’s more, the Amazon Store is not alone in contending with peak events, noted Ben Mildenhall, a senior manager in cloud computing and auto scaling.

“Many AWS external customers have Black Friday and Cyber Monday events as well,” Mildenhall said. “So it’s important we optimize to give all of our customers a great experience.”

CloudTune forecasts provide inputs to AWS to help size infrastructure in a way that maximizes utilization efficiency, noted Mnyshenko. “The way CloudTune specifically helps here is continuously getting better at anticipating the mix of capacity we’re using by generation, by type, by location, so that we can have those conversations and provide this feedback to AWS,” he said.

Granular, flexible, and explainable

Like many demand-forecasting applications, CloudTune is a time-series forecasting system. What’s unique about it is the ability to predict demand at one-minute granularity, noted Mnyshenko. This level of granularity provides insight into patterns such as short-duration spikes in website traffic. Teams use the forecasts as inputs to determine their computing capacity not just for peak events like back to school but also peak times during any given day, week, or month.

“Our comparative advantage is intra-day load predictions at one-minute granularity, allowing us to track actuals during peak events, highlighting these sharp edges where checkout spikes way beyond the natural peak for the period,” Mnyshenko said.

In addition, CloudTune forecasts need to be flexible to accommodate changes in the day and duration of events, such as the evolution of Prime Day from a 24-hour event to a 48-hour event on different days each year.

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At other times, CloudTune needs to make forecasts for special events such as the launch of popular gaming consoles, which may sell out in a matter of minutes.

“That can create a huge spike, and we have to predict the traffic spike and the order spike,” explained Ebrahim Nasrabadi, a senior manager of applied science who leads the CloudTune Forecasting science team.

The team responsible for CloudTune Forecasting has developed modular and configurable models to address these and other challenges, he noted.

For example, built-in functionality allows the removal of outliers — due to things such as a spike in robot traffic that can decrease or increase actual website traffic and order rate unexpectedly — from predictable seasonal behavior and known calendar events. Since these interruptions do not regularly occur, the tool allows forecast teams to exclude those outliers from data used in the forecast.

“Our models are simple and quite flexible to include additional variables and seasonality,” noted Nasrabadi. The models also take into account significant changes in a trend within a dataset, also known as a slope break.

The CloudTune team also emphasizes forecast models that are explainable.

“We have to be very crisp about what we are doing, very transparent about our expectations,” said Wang.

Hundreds of Amazon Store software teams use these forecasts to help determine their AWS capacity needs for peak events. The better these teams understand the forecasts, the more trust they have in them, noted Mnyshenko.

“We need to be able to explain what goes into the ingredients and, more importantly, what we are doing to reduce the spread in errors,” he said.

Continuous automation

Currently, service teams not yet using automation enhancements take the CloudTune forecasts and translate them into capacity orders for servers through the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) using many different manual tools and processes, said Doug Smith, a senior technical program manager responsible for delivering improvements and features to the CloudTune toolset.

A key future direction for CloudTune is to continuously enhance these tools and automate as many manual processes as possible, Smith noted.

The world we’re envisioning between our team and CloudTune is one where services teams don’t have to worry about scaling at all.

“We’re moving into automation so that we can take our CloudTune forecasts as inputs into these new products that we’re building to provide a hands-off experience,” he said.

And while the game days McElheny’s team runs in advance of these major events will continue apace, she has a vision for the future there as well. Today, she said, the forecasts enable simulations of high-level customer journeys. She’d like to get to a forecast that allows her team to simulate an event down to the types of products customers are ordering when and where.

“This matters because different services get called depending on a lot of different factors. The closer we can simulate the real traffic the better, because we’re actually hitting services with the traffic they expect to see during the event,” McElheny said.

To get there, McElheny, Smith, and their colleagues work together to make sure the forecasts provide the best data for the most realistic simulations.

“The world we’re envisioning between our team and CloudTune is one where services teams don’t have to worry about scaling at all,” McElheny said. “CloudTune does it for them, and then we run a game day, and as we find issues during game day, CloudTune goes and places orders to scale things up for those customers.”





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An inside look at Meta’s transition from C to Rust on mobile

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Have you ever worked is legacy code? Are you curious what it takes to modernize systems at a massive scale?

Pascal Hartig is joined on the latest Meta Tech Podcast by Elaine and Buping, two software engineers working on a bold project to rewrite the decades-old C code in one of Meta’s core messaging libraries in Rust. It’s an ambitious effort that will transform a central messaging library that is shared across Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, and Meta’s AR/VR platforms.

They discuss taking on a project of this scope – even without a background in Rust, how they’re approaching it, and what it means to optimize for ‘developer happiness.’

Download or listen to the episode below:

You can also find the episode wherever you get your podcasts, including:

The Meta Tech Podcast is a podcast, brought to you by Meta, where we highlight the work Meta’s engineers are doing at every level – from low-level frameworks to end-user features.

Send us feedback on InstagramThreads, or X.

And if you’re interested in learning more about career opportunities at Meta visit the Meta Careers page.





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Amazon Research Awards recipients announced

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Amazon Research Awards (ARA) provides unrestricted funds and AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating various research topics in multiple disciplines. This cycle, ARA received many excellent research proposals from across the world and today is publicly announcing 73 award recipients who represent 46 universities in 10 countries.

This announcement includes awards funded under five call for proposals during the fall 2024 cycle: AI for Information Security, Automated Reasoning, AWS AI, AWS Cryptography, and Sustainability. Proposals were reviewed for the quality of their scientific content and their potential to impact both the research community and society. Additionally, Amazon encourages the publication of research results, presentations of research at Amazon offices worldwide, and the release of related code under open-source licenses.

Recipients have access to more than 700 Amazon public datasets and can utilize AWS AI/ML services and tools through their AWS Promotional Credits. Recipients also are assigned an Amazon research contact who offers consultation and advice, along with opportunities to participate in Amazon events and training sessions.

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“Automated Reasoning is an important area of research for Amazon, with potential applications across various features and applications to help improve security, reliability, and performance for our customers. Through the ARA program, we collaborate with leading academic researchers to explore challenges in this field,” said Robert Jones, senior principal scientist with the Cloud Automated Reasoning Group. “We were again impressed by the exceptional response to our Automated Reasoning call for proposals this year, receiving numerous high-quality submissions. Congratulations to the recipients! We’re excited to support their work and partner with them as they develop new science and technology in this important area.”

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“At Amazon, we believe that solving the world’s toughest sustainability challenges benefits from both breakthrough scientific research and open and bold collaboration. Through programs like the Amazon Research Awards program, we aim to support academic research that could contribute to our understanding of these complex issues,” said Kommy Weldemariam, Director of Science and Innovation Sustainability. “The selected proposals represent innovative projects that we hope will help advance knowledge in this field, potentially benefiting customers, communities, and the environment.”

ARA funds proposals throughout the year in a variety of research areas. Applicants are encouraged to visit the ARA call for proposals page for more information or send an email to be notified of future open calls.

The tables below list, in alphabetical order by last name, fall 2024 cycle call-for-proposal recipients, sorted by research area.

AI for Information Security

Recipient University Research title
Christopher Amato Northeastern University Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Cyber Defense for Securing Cloud Computing Platforms
Bernd Bischl Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Improving Generative and Foundation Models Reliability via Uncertainty-awareness
Shiqing Ma University Of Massachusetts Amherst LLM and Domain Adaptation for Attack Detection
Alina Oprea Northeastern University Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Cyber Defense for Securing Cloud Computing Platforms
Roberto Perdisci University of Georgia ContextADBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Contextual Anomaly Detection

Automated Reasoning

Recipient University Research title
Nada Amin Harvard University LLM-Augmented Semi-Automated Proofs for Interactive Verification
Suguman Bansal Georgia Institute of Technology Certified Inductive Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Ioana Boureanu University of Surrey Phoebe+: An Automated-Reasoning Tool for Provable Privacy in Cryptographic Systems
Omar Haider Chowdhury Stony Brook University Restricter: An Automatic Tool for Authoring Amazon Cedar Access Control Policies with the Principle of Least Privilege
Stefan Ciobaca Alexandru Ioan Cuza University An Interactive Proof Mode for Dafny
João Ferreira INESC-ID Polyglot Automated Program Repair for Infrastructure as Code
Sicun Gao University Of California, San Diego Monte Carlo Trees with Conflict Models for Proof Search
Mirco Giacobbe University of Birmingham Neural Software Verification
Tobias Grosser University of Cambridge Synthesis-based Symbolic BitVector Simplification for Lean
Ronghui Gu Columbia University Scaling Formal Verification of Security Properties for Unmodified System Software
Alexey Ignatiev Monash University Huub: Next-Gen Lazy Clause Generation
Kenneth McMillan University of Texas At Austin Synthesis of Auxiliary Variables and Invariants for Distributed Protocol Verification
Alexandra Mendes University of Porto Overcoming Barriers to the Adoption of Verification-Aware Languages
Jason Nieh Columbia University Scaling Formal Verification of Security Properties for Unmodified System Software
Rohan Padhye Carnegie Mellon University Automated Synthesis and Evaluation of Property-Based Tests
Nadia Polikarpova University Of California, San Diego Discovering and Proving Critical System Properties with LLMs
Fortunat Rajaona University of Surrey Phoebe+: An Automated-Reasoning Tool for Provable Privacy in Cryptographic Systems
Subhajit Roy Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur Theorem Proving Modulo LLM
Gagandeep Singh University of Illinois At Urbana–Champaign Trustworthy LLM Systems using Formal Contracts
Scott Stoller Stony Brook University Restricter: An Automatic Tool for Authoring Amazon Cedar Access Control Policies with the Principle of Least Privilege
Peter Stuckey Monash University Huub: Next-Gen Lazy Clause Generation
Yulei Sui University of New South Wales Path-Sensitive Typestate Analysis through Sparse Abstract Execution
Nikos Vasilakis Brown University Semantics-Driven Static Analysis for the Unix/Linux Shell
Ping Wang Stevens Institute of Technology Leveraging Large Language Models for Reasoning Augmented Searching on Domain-specific NoSQL Database
John Wawrzynek University of California, Berkeley GPU-Accelerated High-Throughput SAT Sampling

AWS AI

Recipient University Research title
Panagiotis Adamopoulos Emory University Generative AI solutions for The Spillover Effect of Fraudulent Reviews on Product Recommendations
Vikram Adve University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Fellini: Differentiable ML Compiler for Full-Graph Optimization for LLM Models
Frances Arnold California Institute of Technology Closed-loop Generative Machine Learning for De Novo Enzyme Discovery and Optimization
Yonatan Bisk Carnegie Mellon University Useful, Safe, and Robust Multiturn Interactions with LLMs
Shiyu Chang University of California, Santa Barbara Cut the Crap: Advancing the Efficient Communication of Multi-Agent Systems via Spatial-Temporal Topology Design and KV Cache Sharing
Yuxin Chen University of Pennsylvania Provable Acceleration of Diffusion Models for Modern Generative AI
Tianlong Chen University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Cut the Crap: Advancing the Efficient Communication of Multi-Agent Systems via Spatial-Temporal Topology Design and KV Cache Sharing
Mingyu Ding University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Aligning Long Videos and Language as Long-Horizon World Models
Nikhil Garg Cornell University Market Design for Responsible Multi-agent LLMs
Jessica Hullman Northwestern University Human-Aligned Uncertainty Quantification in High Dimensions
Christopher Jermaine Rice University Fast, Trusted AI Using the EINSUMMABLE Compiler
Yunzhu Li Columbia University Physics-Informed Foundation Models Through Embodied Interactions
Pattie Maes Massachusetts Institute of Technology Understanding How LLM Agents Deviate from Human Choices
Sasa Misailovic University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Fellini: Differentiable ML Compiler for Full-Graph Optimization for LLM Models
Kristina Monakhova Cornell University Trustworthy extreme imaging for science using interpretable uncertainty quantification
Todd Mowry Carnegie Mellon University Efficient LLM Serving on Trainium via Kernel Generation
Min-hwan Oh Seoul National University Mutually Beneficial Interplay Between Selection Fairness and Context Diversity in Contextual Bandits
Patrick Rebeschini University of Oxford Optimal Regularization for LLM Alignment
Jose Renau University of California, Santa Cruz Verification Constrained Hardware Optimization using Intelligent Design Agentic Programming
Vilma Todri Emory University Generative AI solutions for The Spillover Effect of Fraudulent Reviews on Product Recommendations
Aravindan Vijayaraghavan Northwestern University Human-Aligned Uncertainty Quantification in High Dimensions
Wei Yang University of Texas at Dallas Optimizing RISC-V Compilers with RISC-LLM and Syntax Parsing
Huaxiu Yao University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Aligning Long Videos and Language as Long-Horizon World Models
Amy Zhang University of Washington Tools for Governing AI Agent Autonomy
Ruqi Zhang Purdue University Efficient Test-time Alignment for Large Language Models and Large Multimodal Models
Zheng Zhang Rutgers University-New Brunswick AlphaQC: An AI-powered Quantum Circuit Optimizer and Denoiser

AWS Cryptography

Recipient University Research title
Alexandra Boldyreva Georgia Institute of Technology Quantifying Information Leakage in Searchable Encryption Protocols
Maria Eichlseder Graz University of Technology, Austria SALAD – Systematic Analysis of Lightweight Ascon-based Designs
Venkatesan Guruswami University of California, Berkeley Obfuscation, Proof Systems, and Secure Computation: A Research Program on Cryptography at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing
Joseph Jaeger Georgia Institute of Technology Analyzing Chat Encryption for Group Messaging
Aayush Jain Carnegie Mellon Large Scale Multiparty Silent Preprocessing for MPC from LPN
Huijia Lin University of Washington Large Scale Multiparty Silent Preprocessing for MPC from LPN
Hamed Nemati KTH Royal Institute of Technology Trustworthy Automatic Verification of Side-Channel Countermeasures for Binary Cryptographic Programs using the HoIBA libary
Karl Palmskog KTH Royal Institute of Technology Trustworthy Automatic Verification of Side-Channel Countermeasures for Binary Cryptographic Programs using the HoIBA libary
Chris Peikert University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Practical Third-Generation FHE and Bootstrapping
Dimitrios Skarlatos Carnegie Mellon University Scale-Out FHE LLMs on GPUs
Vinod Vaikuntanathan Massachusetts Institute of Technology Can Quantum Computers (Really) Factor?
Daniel Wichs Northeastern University Obfuscation, Proof Systems, and Secure Computation: A Research Program on Cryptography at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing
David Wu University Of Texas At Austin Fast Private Information Retrieval and More using Homomorphic Encryption

Sustainability

Recipient University Research title
Meeyoung Cha Max Planck Institute Forest-Blossom (Flossom): A New Framework for Sustaining Forest Biodiversity Through Outcome-Driven Remote Sensing Monitoring
Jingrui He University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Foundation Model Enabled Earth’s Ecosystem Monitoring
Pedro Lopes University of Chicago AI-powered Tools that Enable Engineers to Make & Re-make Sustainable Hardware
Cheng Yaw Low Max Planck Institute Forest-Blossom (Flossom): A New Framework for Sustaining Forest Biodiversity Through Outcome-Driven Remote Sensing Monitoring





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Independent evaluations demonstrate Nova Premier’s safety

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AI safety is a priority at Amazon. Our investment in safe, transparent, and responsible AI (RAI) includes collaboration with the global community and policymakers. We are members of and collaborate with organizations such as the Frontier Model Forum, the Partnership on AI, and other forums organized by government agencies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Consistent with Amazon’s endorsement of the Korea Frontier AI Safety Commitments, we published our Frontier Model Safety Framework earlier this year.

Amazon Nova Premier’s guardrails help prevent generation of unsafe content.

During the development of the Nova Premier model, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation to assess its performance and safety. This included testing on both internal and public benchmarks and internal/automated and third-party red-teaming exercises. Once the final model was ready, we prioritized obtaining unbiased, third-party evaluations of the model’s robustness against RAI controls. In this post, we outline the key findings from these evaluations, demonstrating the strength of our testing approach and Amazon Premier’s standing as a safe model. Specifically, we cover our evaluations with two third-party evaluators: PRISM AI and ActiveFence.

Evaluation of Nova Premier against PRISM AI

PRISM Eval’s Behavior Elicitation Tool (BET) dynamically and systematically stress-tests AI models’ safety guardrails. The methodology focuses on measuring how many adversarial attempts (steps) it takes to get a model to generate harmful content across several key risk dimensions. The central metric is “steps to elicit” — the number of increasingly sophisticated prompting attempts required before a model generates an inappropriate response. A higher number of steps indicates stronger safety measures, as the model is more resistant to manipulation. The PRISM risk dimensions (inspired by the MLCommons AI Safety Benchmarks) include CBRNE weapons, violent crimes, non-violent crimes, defamation, and hate, amongst several others.

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Using the BET Eval tool and its V1.0 metric, which is tailored toward non-reasoning models, we compared the recently released Nova models (Pro and Premier) to the latest models in the same class: Claude (3.5 v2 and 3.7 non-reasoning) and Llama4 Maverick, all available through Amazon Bedrock. PRISM BET conducts black-box evaluations (where model developers don’t have access to the test prompts) of models integrated with their API. The evaluation conducted with BET Eval MAX, PRISM’s most comprehensive/aggressive testing suite, revealed significant variations in safety against malicious instructions. Nova models demonstrated superior overall safety performance, with an average of 43 steps for Premier and 52 steps for Pro, compared to 37.7 for Claude 3.5 v2 and fewer than 12 steps for other models in the comparison set (namely, 9.9 for Claude3.7, 11.5 for Claude 3.7 thinking, and 6.5 for Maverick). This higher step count suggests that on average, Nova’s safety guardrails are more sophisticated and harder to circumvent through adversarial prompting. The figure below presents the number of steps per harm category evaluated through BET Eval MAX.

Results of tests using PRISM’s BET Eval MAX testing suite.

The PRISM evaluation provides valuable insights into the relative safety of different Amazon Bedrock models. Nova’s strong performance, particularly in hate speech and defamation resistance, represents meaningful progress in AI safety. However, the results also highlight the ongoing challenge of building truly robust safety measures into AI systems. As the field continues to evolve, frameworks like BET will play an increasingly important role in benchmarking and improving AI safety. As a part of this collaboration Nicolas Miailhe, CEO of PRISM Eval, said, “It’s incredibly rewarding for us to see Nova outperforming strong baselines using the BET Eval MAX; our aim is to build a long-term partnership toward safer-by-design models and to make BET available to various model providers.” Organizations deploying AI systems should carefully consider these safety metrics when selecting models for their applications.

Manual red teaming with ActiveFence

The AI safety & security company ActiveFence benchmarked Nova Premier on Bedrock on prompts distributed across Amazon’s eight core RAI categories. ActiveFence also evaluated Claude 3.7 (non-reasoning mode) and GPT 4.1 API on the same set. The flag rate on Nova Premier was lower than that on the other two models, indicating that Nova Premier is the safest of the three.

Model 3P Flag Rate [↓ is better]
Nova Premier 12.0%
Sonnet 3.7 (non-reasoning) 20.6%
GPT4.1 API 22.4%

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Generative AI raises new challenges in defining, measuring, and mitigating concerns about fairness, toxicity, and intellectual property, among other things. But work has started on the solutions.

“Our role is to think like an adversary but act in service of safety,” said Guy Paltieli from ActiveFence. “By conducting a blind stress test of Nova Premier under realistic threat scenarios, we helped evaluate its security posture in support of Amazon’s broader responsible-AI goals, ensuring the model could be deployed with greater confidence.”

These evaluations conducted with PRISM and ActiveFence give us confidence in the strength of our guardrails and our ability to protect our customers’ safety when they use our models. While these evaluations demonstrate strong safety performance, we recognize that AI safety is an ongoing challenge requiring continuous improvement. These assessments represent a point-in-time snapshot, and we remain committed to regular testing and enhancement of our safety measures. No AI system can guarantee perfect safety in all scenarios, which is why we maintain monitoring and response systems after deployment.

Acknowledgments: Vincent Ponzo, Elyssa Vincent





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