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World Congress 2026 Europe • Jul 10, 2026 • Session details

20 Years of Solving Unsolvable Problems

Werner Vogels

How do you synchronize global databases when the CAP theorem says it's impossible? By deploying atomic clocks, AWS spent 20 years solving unsolvable constraints through invisible engineering.

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#1 about 3 min

Operating at unprecedented scale in the early days

How outgrowing commercial software limits forced early engineering teams to design custom distributed systems.

#2 about 4 min

The database outage that inspired the creation of Dynamo

Investigating a massive holiday outage revealed that data was largely non-relational, leading to the creation of Dynamo.

#3 about 4 min

Productizing internal APIs and revolutionizing cloud economics

Launching an infrastructure service transformed the IT industry by introducing a pay-as-you-go economic model.

#4 about 3 min

The crucial role of invisible engineering in systems

Why the most critical operational work, like continuous security and predictable performance, remains unseen by users.

#5 about 7 min

Building AWS Nitro to eliminate the virtualization tax

Eliminating the hypervisor bottleneck and Dom0 vulnerabilities by moving virtualization and IO to dedicated hardware.

#6 about 6 min

Evolving serverless compute with Firecracker and SnapStart

Developing open-source microVMs and snapshotting features effectively eliminated cold starts for latency-sensitive serverless applications.

#7 about 7 min

Bringing accurate time synchronization to global distributed systems

Solving the impossibility of accurate time in distributed systems by wiring microsecond hardware clocks directly into server instances.

#8 about 2 min

Taking professional pride in invisible engineering work

Why developers should prioritize rigorous operational excellence even when the outside world cannot see their effort.

Matching moments

3:28 min

Discussing history and enterprise adoption of serverless

Oliver Arafat · LIVE

2:14 min

Solving complex platform architecture challenges at an enterprise scale

Maria Apazoglou · Coffee With Developers

4:47 min

Final performance results and key architectural takeaways

Yedidya Schwartz · LIVE

2:09 min

Speaker background and the vision for cybernetic transformation

Romano Roth Romano Roth · WWC 2025

4:36 min

Hiring passionate software engineers to tackle unprecedented scaling challenges

Dana Lawson Dana Lawson +1 · WWC Europe 2026

2:16 min

Resolving resource scaling challenges with dynamic serverless deployments

Daniel Oh Daniel Oh +1 · WWC 2024

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