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The Amazon Builders' Library

 Colm MacCárthaigh, Senior Principal Engineer

Colm MacCárthaigh is a Senior Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services. Before working on EC2, cryptography, and networking, Colm helped build Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon Route 53. Colm is also an Open Source contributor, and one of the authors of the Apache httpd webserver, as well as Amazon s2n, the AWS implementation of the SSL/TLS protocols. When not working on technical things, Colm is a musician and singer and frequently plays, tours, and records Irish music internationally.

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Portrait photo of an author wearing glasses and a white shirt, standing indoors, with blurred buildings in the background.

Authored by Colm

Reliability, constant work, and a good cup of coffee
Simplifying systems to deliver stability by avoiding scaling during times of stress.

Beyond five 9s: Lessons from our highest available data planes
In this video, hear lessons from how AWS has built and architected Amazon Route 53 and the AWS authentication system, designed to survive cataclysmic failures, enormous load increases, and more.

Amazon’s approach to security during development
In this video, learn about how AWS teams both minimize security risks in our products and respond to security issues proactively.

Workload isolation using shuffle-sharding
Shuffle Sharding is one of our core techniques for drastically limiting the scope of impact of operational issues.