What Are the Best Tech Readings?

Ah, I see what you're getting at now - you want to understand the infrastructure layer fundamentals: how do you build systems like EC2, S3, ELB themselves, not just the data layer.

The challenge: There aren't many great books specifically about building IaaS/PaaS systems like EC2 or S3. Most are either too high-level (cloud architecture patterns) or too specific (how to use AWS).

Best resources for understanding these systems:

Papers (the gold standard):

• "The Google File System" (GFS) - Foundation for understanding distributed storage like S3
• "MapReduce" and "Borg" papers - Container orchestration/resource management (EC2-like concepts)
• "TAO: Facebook's Distributed Data Store" - Caching and scale
• AWS's own papers on S3, Aurora, etc. when they publish them

Books that get closest:

• "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" - Still relevant! Chapters on storage, encoding, replication apply to S3/EBS design
• "Site Reliability Engineering" (Google's SRE book) - Free online, covers building reliable distributed systems at scale
• "Database Internals" by Alex Petrov - Has sections on distributed storage systems
• "Systems Performance" by Brendan Gregg - Understanding performance/reliability at the systems level

Specific to what you're asking:

For EC2-like systems (virtualization/orchestration):

• Understand hypervisors (Xen, KVM), containerization
• "The Practice of Cloud System Administration" touches on this
• Borg/Kubernetes papers and architecture docs

For S3-like systems (distributed object storage):

• GFS paper, then Ceph architecture docs
• DDIA chapters on replication, partitioning, consistency
• Understanding erasure coding, consistency models, CAP theorem

For ELB-like systems (load balancing):

• "The Practice of System and Network Administration"
• Papers on Google's Maglev, Facebook's load balancing
• Understanding consistent hashing, health checks, connection draining

The hard truth: The deepest knowledge about building AWS-level infrastructure comes from:

1. Reading research papers
2. AWS re:Invent deep-dive talks (many are on YouTube)
3. Open-source implementations (Kubernetes, Ceph, OpenStack)
4. Actually building distributed systems

My recommendation for you: Given you're working with AWS infrastructure professionally, I'd suggest:

1. DDIA - Gives you the foundational concepts
2. Google SRE book (free online) - Reliability/scalability patterns
3. AWS re:Invent talks - Search for "deep dive" talks on services you use
4. Read the papers - Start with GFS, Dynamo, Borg

The 2011 EC2 book still wouldn't give you this depth - it was more "here's how to SSH into an instance" than "here's how EC2's virtualization layer works."

Does this align better with what you're looking for?