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The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

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Re: The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

#11

Post by madrox »

rurp wrote: post #9

> $102 million in infrastructure spend for an event that brought in over $12.7 billion in sales isn’t the worst return on investment that companies could make — by a landslide! Well it's not amazing if your margin's are tiny, as they are in many industries (such as retail). Plus this was almost certainly architected by some of the foremost AWS experts in the world. It's verrrry easy to spend vastly more than was stri…

Important to remember that, before you could burst your infrastructure in the cloud, sites simply went offline in events like this. You took actively lost revenue in those cases.

Re: The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

#12

Post by jayzalowitz »

Corey is probably right, but id chunk an extra 10-20% of overprovisioning/undercounting on actual bill here and considering they OWN the fleet, they probably went out of there way to have disaster recovery ready to go in a bunch more contexts.

Re: The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

#13

Post by version_five » 

  Amazon Prime Day event resulted in an incremental 163 petabytes of EBS storage capacity allocated – generating a peak of 15.35 trillion requests and 764 petabytes of data transfer per day.
The main thing that strikes me is how (seemingly) inefficient everything is. What do they possibly need this amount of data for in selling stuff? Are they taking high-def video of every customer as they browse for something to buy? I get that it's a huge company and this is (I guess) their business time, but how can the y need so much storage. Ditto for much of the other stuff.

Re: The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

#14

Post by CamperBob2 »

version_five wrote: post #13

Amazon Prime Day event resulted in an incremental 163 petabytes of EBS storage capacity allocated – generating a peak of 15.35 trillion requests and 764 petabytes of data transfer per day. The main thing that strikes me is how (seemingly) inefficient everything is. What do they possibly need this amount of data for in selling stuff? Are they taking high-def video of every customer as they browse for something to buy?…

Hot take: Amazon's search UX is so terrible that it not only wastes near-endless amounts of customer time and patience, but their own bandwidth as well.

Re: The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

#16

Post by Uvix »

madrox wrote: post #11
rurp wrote: post #9

> $102 million in infrastructure spend for an event that brought in over $12.7 billion in sales isn’t the worst return on investment that companies could make — by a landslide! Well it's not amazing if your margin's are tiny, as they are in many industries (such as retail). Plus this was almost certainly architected by some of the foremost AWS experts in the world. It's verrrry easy to spend vastly more than was stri…

Important to remember that, before you could burst your infrastructure in the cloud, sites simply went offline in events like this. You took actively lost revenue in those cases.

Depending on the margins that could be preferable.

Re: The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

#17

Post by boulos »

rurp wrote: post #9

> $102 million in infrastructure spend for an event that brought in over $12.7 billion in sales isn’t the worst return on investment that companies could make — by a landslide! Well it's not amazing if your margin's are tiny, as they are in many industries (such as retail). Plus this was almost certainly architected by some of the foremost AWS experts in the world. It's verrrry easy to spend vastly more than was stri…

Yes, at 1% margin on those sales, that's more like $125M in revenue. It's important to remember that things like Prime Day are basically marketing that results in revenue outside the event.

Re: The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

#18

Post by Retric »

rurp wrote: post #9

> $102 million in infrastructure spend for an event that brought in over $12.7 billion in sales isn’t the worst return on investment that companies could make — by a landslide! Well it's not amazing if your margin's are tiny, as they are in many industries (such as retail). Plus this was almost certainly architected by some of the foremost AWS experts in the world. It's verrrry easy to spend vastly more than was stri…

Yea, actual profit was likely 100 - 400 million or so. As such spending 102 million on a single line item would be a serious question for most companies.

Of course Amazon is paying itself that premium so they have little incentive to care.

Re: The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

#19

Post by ovao »

Seanambers wrote: post #15

Isn't the real clue here that the prices in the article are cost + margin. AMZN gets a steal.

And notably, AWS can, and likely does, allocate whatever unused or unpartitioned infra to themselves (or, more pedantically, to Amazon). A perpetual ‘savings plan’.

Re: The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

#20

Post by kamikaz1k »

version_five wrote: post #13

Amazon Prime Day event resulted in an incremental 163 petabytes of EBS storage capacity allocated – generating a peak of 15.35 trillion requests and 764 petabytes of data transfer per day. The main thing that strikes me is how (seemingly) inefficient everything is. What do they possibly need this amount of data for in selling stuff? Are they taking high-def video of every customer as they browse for something to buy?…

Sometimes it’s just a bad decision that happens to “scaLe”. Like the print video thing.[1]

1. https://youtu.be/J7ITgYBn_3k

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