A substantial amount of the traffic on the internet goes through AWS. A lot of the ready made, off the shelf components and software systems that are readily available simply don't scale to handle AWS level of load. As AWS started to grow, they were forced to build a lot of technology themselves. At times they had to innovate and create new technology from scratch. Nitro cards are one such technology. Even though AWS acquired a startup called Annapurna labs that served pivotal role in the design and development of the Nitro system, engineers at AWS contributed a lot to this technology too. This talk dives deep into the AWS Nitro system.

At the time when TCP/IP stack was created internet was still in it's infantcy. Before TCP/IP it was more common for a few gigantic routers centarally located in a few universities to hold all the routing information. OSI model and subsequently TCP/IP model which were the models on which internet runs today, fundamentally changed the landscape of networking. Rather than a few large routers responsible for all the routing happening on the network, several smaller routers that act like a distributed network were created to form the Internet. A lot of the features in TCP are for routing packets over an unrealiable network spawning the whole entire planet i.e the internet. A lot of these features are overkill for datacenter networking. In the coming decades several people are predicitng that TCP will be phased out of datacenters completely.