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0 pointsjcrites5y ago0 comments

Amazon runs virtually everything on AWS. There are probably some exceptions for exotic infrastructure, but the vast majority of compute and storage systems at Amazon run on top of AWS. There's probably a team using every single AWS service somewhere in the company.

This doesn't mean that Amazon only uses AWS products, though. Amazon continues to use e.g. Akamai for static content hosting for some use-cases, in addition to using CloudFront for other use-cases, and other products beyond that.

Amazon also uses third-party services. For example, while Amazon has long been using Chime internally for IM, chat, and voice/video calling (Chime being the AWS solution for those things), they recently announced a partnership with Slack [1]. To summarize, Amazon will deploy Slack and use it for chat, while Slack will deploy Chime and use it for voice/video calling. I believe that Slack has been running on AWS since its founding [2]. I would hazard a guess that an undertone of the agreement is that Chime will continue focusing on its strength (which is voice/video calling for organizations) and probably not invest a lot in the chat features where Slack is already strong, and vice versa.

All that being said, certainly not everything runs on AWS across all of Amazon, which is a big company, with a host of acquisitions like Zappos, Twitch, Whole Foods, etc., that come with their own legacy or custom infrastructure.

But bread-and-butter software teams at Amazon all typically run on AWS.

[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200604005766/en/AWS...

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/slack/#:~:text....

0 comments

mrep5y ago

> Amazon runs virtually everything on AWS.

Does sable, the internal nosql database used for practically everything in retail run on AWS nowadays? Cause it didn't back in 2018 which and partially why they couldn't scale up on prime day and got overloaded [0, and have friends who worked in retail].

[0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/report-why-amazon-crashed-on-prime...

MaxBarraclough5y ago

> Amazon continues to use e.g. Akamai for static content hosting for some use-cases, in addition to using CloudFront for other use-cases

I find this pretty surprising. Do you know the reason?

jcritesOP5y ago

I don't actually know the reason. I'll see if I can find out and whether it's appropriate to share. It's possible that it's a redundancy thing (have multiple providers so we stay up if one goes down), a performance thing, or it could be a features thing. I don't know.

I will note that what Akamai is trying to do: serve static content extremely quickly from locations close to all customers, is a bit different from what the typical AWS services and AWS region are trying to do. Akamai probably wants to cache identical content all over the world, in boxes that I would expect to be present within the network of many different ISPs (just like Netflix does to serve its video [1]).

In Oct 2019, CloudFront announced that they had 200 different points of presence (POPS) around the globe [2]. I don't know exactly how to compare Akamai to CloudFront, but Akamai claims to have POPs in over 130 countries and in 1,700 networks [3]. Akamai was founded only four years after Amazon and has been focused on content distribution since then. Just like a company can't snap their fingers and have Amazon's retail logistics presence, AWS can't snap its fingers and have CloudFront POPs in every country/network/ISP where Amazon Retail needs good performance. The answer may be that they're still catching up.

I'm completely I'm speculating though, and don't have any knowledge about this beyond the public research that I linked to.

[1] https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/200-amazon-cloudfront-point...

[3] https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/visualizing-akamai/me...

psz5y ago

My guesses: a) Amazon.com/co.uk/etc traffic is too big even for CloudFront. b) They don't want Amazon.com traffic to evict AWS customers' cached items out of CloudFront, the very reason customers buy CloudFront in the first place. c) Legacy, they just didn't move from Akamai yet.

amelius5y ago

Content distribution is easily commoditized, hence not very interesting for Amazon.

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