Amazon.com on AWS

2018 Amazon migrated its transactional subledger from Oracle to AWS to maintain its core mission of delivering timely, complete, and accurate financial reports as transaction volumes continue to grow. Amazon migrated critical databases to Amazon DynamoDB and used a lift-and-shift approach to migrate relational databases to Amazon RDS.

2018 Amazon migrated its Item Master Service from Oracle to Amazon DynamoDB to improve availability and scalability, reduce operational burden, and improve utilization. Amazon used AWS Database Migration Service to migrate 150 TB of data in just two months with zero downtime, and now relies on Amazon DynamoDB to process more than five billion catalog updates every day without significant manual effort.

2018 The Amazon.com Transaction Risk Management Services (TRMS) team migrated 40 TB of data from on-premises Oracle databases to AWS in just six months with only one hour of downtime. TRMS runs the Buyer Fraud Service, which uses machine-learning algorithms to predict and prevent fraudulent transactions on Amazon.com. The TRMS team used a migration stack that included AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to migrate to a new relational database solution based on PostgreSQL-compatible Amazon Aurora.

2018 Amazon Advertising Engineering and Development (AED) increased throughput and avoided a three-year project to rebuild performance monitors and management tools by shifting data held in Oracle databases to Amazon RDS. AED builds, manages, and scales the technologies that undergird Amazon's programmatic advertising offerings. The new solution uses PostgreSQL relational databases that are fully managed by Amazon RDS, with Amazon S3 for storing backups.

2018 Amazon.com switched from tape backup to Amazon S3 for backing up the majority of its databases. This strategy reduced complexity and capital expenditures, provided faster backup and restore performance, eliminated tape-capacity planning for backup and archive, and freed administrative staff for higher value operations. By switching from tape backup to Amazon S3, Amazon.com realized a 12x performance improvement and reduced restore time from 15 hours to 2.5 hours in select scenarios.

2017 When customers across the globe place orders on Amazon.com, those orders are processed through many different backend systems. One of those key systems is Herd, a workflow-orchestration engine developed by the Amazon eCommerce Foundation Team. Herd controls the business logic for processing all Amazon.com customer orders worldwide, orchestrating more than 1,300 workflows for everything from order processing to fulfillment-center operations to coordinating parts of the Amazon Alexa backend. A mission-critical system used by more than 300 Amazon engineering teams, Herd executes more than 4 billion workflows on peak days.

2018 When Amazon Prime Video won the rights to stream NFL Thursday Night Football games in more than 200 countries, it knew it needed to provide the best possible experience for millions of fans watching their favorite teams. “With live sporting events, reliability and low latency are absolutely critical because every lost second negatively impacts viewers,” explains BA Winston, the global head of digital video playback and delivery for Amazon Video. “If there are any interruptions or buffering, the fans won’t watch.”

2017 When customers across the globe place orders on Amazon.com, those orders are processed through many different backend systems. One of those key systems is Herd, a workflow-orchestration engine developed by the Amazon eCommerce Foundation Team. Herd controls the business logic for processing all Amazon.com customer orders worldwide, orchestrating more than 1,300 workflows for everything from order processing to fulfillment-center operations to coordinating parts of the Amazon Alexa backend. A mission-critical system used by more than 300 Amazon engineering teams, Herd executes more than 4 billion workflows on peak days.