Prime Day 2017 – Powered by AWS

The third annual Prime Day set another round of records for global orders, topping Black Friday and Cyber Monday, making it the biggest day in Amazon retail history. Over the course of the 30 hour event, tens of millions of Prime members purchased things like Echo Dots, Fire tablets, programmable pressure cookers, espresso machines, rechargeable batteries, and much more! July 11th also set a record for the number of new Prime memberships, as people signed up in order to take advantage of hundreds of thousands of deals. Amazon customers shopped online and made heavy use of the Amazon App, with mobile orders more than doubling from last Prime Day.

Powered by AWS
Last year I told you about How AWS Powered Amazon’s Biggest Day Ever, and shared what the team had learned with regard to preparation, automation, monitoring, and thinking big. All of those lessons still apply and you can read that post to learn more. Preparation for this year’s Prime Day (which started just days after Prime Day 2016 wrapped up) started by collecting and sharing best practices and identifying areas for improvement, proceeding to implementation and stress testing as the big day approached. Two of the best practices involve auditing and GameDay:

Auditing – This is a formal way for us to track preparations, identify risks, and to track progress against our objectives. Each team must respond to a series of detailed technical and operational questions that are designed to help them determine their readiness. On the technical side, questions could revolve around time to recovery after a database failure, including the all-important check of the TTL (time to live) for the CNAME. Operational questions address schedules for on-call personnel, points of contact, and ownership of services & instances.

GameDay – This practice (which I believe originated with former Amazonian Jesse Robbins), is intended to validate all of the capacity planning & preparation and to verify that all of the necessary operational practices are in place and work as expected. It introduces simulated failures and helps to train the team to identify and quickly resolve issues, building muscle memory in the process. It also tests failover and recovery capabilities, and can expose latent defects that are lurking under the covers. GameDays help teams to understand scaling drivers (page views, orders, and so forth) and gives them an opportunity to test their scaling practices. To learn more, read Resilience Engineering: Learning to Embrace Failure or watch the video: GameDay: Creating Resiliency Through Destruction.

Prime Day 2017 Metrics
So, how did we do this year?

The AWS teams checked their dashboards and log files, and were happy to share their metrics with me. Here are a few of the most interesting ones:

Block Storage – Use of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) grew by 40% year-over-year, with aggregate data transfer jumping to 52 petabytes (a 50% increase) for the day and total I/O requests rising to 835 million (a 30% increase). The team told me that they loved the elasticity of EBS, and that they were able to ramp down on capacity after Prime Day concluded instead of being stuck with it.

NoSQL Database – Amazon DynamoDB requests from Alexa, the Amazon.com sites, and the Amazon fulfillment centers totaled 3.34 trillion, peaking at 12.9 million per second. According to the team, the extreme scale, consistent performance, and high availability of DynamoDB let them meet needs of Prime Day without breaking a sweat.

Stack Creation – Nearly 31,000 AWS CloudFormation stacks were created for Prime Day in order to bring additional AWS resources on line.

API Usage – AWS CloudTrail processed over 50 billion events and tracked more than 419 billion calls to various AWS APIs, all in support of Prime Day.

Configuration Tracking – AWS Config generated over 14 million Configuration items for AWS resources.

You Can Do It
Running an event that is as large, complex, and mission-critical as Prime Day takes a lot of planning. If you have an event of this type in mind, please take a look at our new Infrastructure Event Readiness white paper. Inside, you will learn how to design and provision your applications to smoothly handle planned scaling events such as product launches or seasonal traffic spikes, with sections on automation, resiliency, cost optimization, event management, and more.

— Jeff;