
Prime Day 2017: 12.9M DynamoDB requests per second - ra7
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/prime-day-2017-powered-by-aws/
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Artemis2
Something I appreciate very much with AWS is how much dogfooding Amazon does.
In contrast, Google has said in the past that GCP is not used by Google
engineers (and it shows, occasionally GCP goes down but actual Google products
do not!). There is also no clear indication that Microsoft is actively using
the public deployment of Azure.

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chimeracoder
> In contrast, Google has said in the past that GCP is not used by Google
> engineers (and it shows, occasionally GCP goes down but actual Google
> products do not!)

Amazon (the shopping website) is generally online when AWS goes down, so that
doesn't really indicate anything.

Also, GCP is directly modeled after the infrastructure that Google uses to
develop internally. I don't know if it's actually the same exact
infrastructure that they sell as GCP, but it's not like they're developing GCP
fresh and selling it.

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tkahnoski
This is on point, GCP is modeled after Google's infrastructure not how Google
itself is run. Whereas Amazon runs on the same technology just not in the same
datacenter.

(My impression is that Amazon operates out of a different region than the
public AWS. Much like GovCloud isn't the same as the public regions. Hence an
AWS region being impacted doesn't necessarily impact Amazon itself since their
separately operated.)

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discodave
The idea that Amazon uses a different / secret AWS region is false.

However, not all of Amazon.com has migrated to AWS.

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tcarn
Amazing metrics, the website performed flawlessly and their entire
organization should get a giant round of applause

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delecti
After hearing pagers going off throughout that day, it's reassuring to hear
someone on the outside say everything went flawlessly.

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rajathagasthya
I’m curious, how do you prep for things like the Prime Day? I imagine almost
all parts of Amazon.com and AWS operate at their limits, especially resource-
wise. What precautions do you take?

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lxmcneill
Jeff covered this in the post (GameDays, excessive amounts of auditing, etc.).
Regarding the resource limits you suggest, they mention metrics of 50+ pB of
data movement and 3.34 trillion DynamoDB queries in 30 hours, all of which
they elastically scale down after the event... so I'd say resource limitations
are more in terms of humans on-deck and crisis management, rather than
physical limitation of hardware.

(edited to correct size - was 52 pB not 520 pB...)

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pentelian
When I read that I thought holy heck... on DynamoBD, if it's not a case study
about Amazon then that company is in serious financial trouble.

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dx034
I'm sure that any external client using >1bn queries per day would get a very
different pricing from the one advertised.

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jjeaff
I have heard that the price is the price for AWS and that the small guys pay
the same as the biggest ones. But I have no evidence to back that up.

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lkrubner
This is a good example of the stupidity of the normal rules that Hacker News
enforces about article titles. I am glad they made an exception in this case.
I never would have read this if the headline text had been "Prime Day 2017 –
Powered by AWS". I did read the article, because in this case, Hacker News
allowed the title to highlight what I would find interesting: the incredible
performance of DynamoDB.

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dastbe
I don't think the rules actually say you can't edit titles. At best, they ask
that you please use the original title unless misleading or linkbait.

You could argue that the original title is misleading, because you would've
thought that it was some advertisement (though isn't anything touting large
numbers a form of advertising?).

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sandGorgon
What is Dynamodb used for internally? Looks like it's being used for
fulfillment and checkout as well.

Is Amazon entirely based out of Dynamodb nosql ?

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plandis
According to this Amazon job listing [1], DynamoDB isn't even the biggest (in
terms of throughput) data store that Amazon uses.

[1] [https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/447605/systems-
engineer](https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/447605/systems-engineer)

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jonhohle
I miss SABLE. I like it better than DDB, but I'm probably in the minority
there. It made building high throughput services easy. I'm somewhat surprised
it mentioned publicly.

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rprime
> I'm somewhat surprised it mentioned publicly.

I guess it explains why I am not able to find any information related to
SABLE. Are you able to release anything related to it? It seems really
interesting.

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vegbrasil
I wonder how many of that were made by bots looking for the best prices...

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patrickxb
Must be nice if you don't have to pay for it...

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jjeaff
If they operate like lots of other big corps, I would think the retail arm
actually would have to pay AWS for the service. Obviously zero sum, but you
want can't know your true profit and loss for individual business units if you
don't.

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uji
Is Amazon comfortable enough to create single point of failure. What if DDB
goes down assuming they run same stack for both retail and AWS?

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phamilton
> What if DDB goes down

It's worth clarifying that question. What does "Go Down" mean? One region is
down? Is it a bad software bug?

The database itself is fault tolerant. Nodes can go down all day without any
real consequence. Each region is isolated, so a failure in one region won't
affect other regions.

I guess I'm at a loss for the type of failure with DDB that would make it a
SPOF, especially more than other datastores.

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dx034
How do they structure regions? Is amazon.co.uk running on different regions
than amazon.com? Or everything distributed globally?

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yeukhon
The elasticity of EBS sizing on demand from this year really is a shocking and
exciting news.

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mattdennewitz
what'd that cost?

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jlgaddis
Good thing they aren't paying $0.09/GB for data transfer!

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h4pless
So what? I still got a 500 error while trying to process an order and when I
refreshed - sold out. "60% of the time - it works every time" is only good for
Panther scented cologne.

12,900,000 / second - WOW. Too bad the request rate was probably closer to
15,000,000 / second and you just abandoned everyone else.

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scrollaway
I don't know what is blowing my mind more: Those numbers, or reading someone
on this site reacting to them with a "so what?".

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brndnmtthws
"Prime Day" is a rip-off, and the pricing schemes border on fraudulent. Give
yourselves a pat on the back for tricking people into spending money they'd be
better off saving.

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dvt
If you're going to say stuff like this, at least provide a modicum of
evidence. What pricing scheme, in particular, is borderline fraudulent? Does
it differ fundamentally from events like Black Friday? Why should people save
money instead of spending it?

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brndnmtthws
Just do an internet search for "prime day scam", or something to that effect.
The FTC has been investigating Amazon for their price deception tactics:
[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-whole-foods-m-a-amazon-
ft...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-whole-foods-m-a-amazon-ftc/ftc-
probing-allegations-of-amazons-deceptive-discounting-idUSKBN1A52R5)

Here's more on the report: [http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/story/your-amazon-
sale-item-...](http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/story/your-amazon-sale-item-
truly-discounted-here%E2%80%99s-how-find-out)

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plandis
I'm not going to say you're lying but I think you're being eh misleading. This
investigation is happening due to increased scrutiny of the Whole Foods merger
and isn't a formal investigation by the FTC.

Effectively the FTC is required to do its due diligence and the FTC has not
accused Amazon of anything. It's some third-party group making the accusation.

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brndnmtthws
> A study conducted by Consumer Watchdog in March found that for 61% of Amazon
> AMZN, -2.48% products, the pre-discounted price or “reference price” used
> for comparison with the new sale price was higher than what the products had
> been sold for in the past 90 days. This means the amount Amazon advertises
> under “you save” could be inaccurate. Amazon said the prices reflect
> averages of prices listed by competitors and other sources.

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dvt
This sounds pretty tame to me. Hardly the Deep Throat moment you're making it
out to be. In fact, I'd wager that most retailers probably do this for big
sales events.

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clu3l355
Other retailers doing it doesn't absolve Amazon

