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Do they do this? I have asked some friends who are developers at AWS and both told me that they don't worry or even know what their usage costs. But that's just anecdote; perhaps their boss knows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Or you could just design your architecture to not perform trillions of database requests for hundreds of millions of sales. The listing data is almost static and should almost fit in RAM (the hot set probably does. Apparently Amazon has ~350M listings. A 24TB RAM server could give ~68kB/listing, and probably only a small fraction is hot). Since you'll need multiple servers anyway, you could shard on products and defi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you could just design your architecture to not perform trillions of database requests for hundreds of millions of sales. The listing data is almost static and should almost fit in RAM (the hot set probably does. Apparently Amazon has ~350M listings. A 24TB RAM server could give ~68kB/listing, and probably only a small fraction is hot). Since you'll need multiple servers anyway, you could shard on products and defi…
I think you're forgetting that Amazon doesn't have a 100% conversion rate...
Even if AWS treats Amazon like any customer the article is off by a factor of 30-60%. RIs for their RDS instances. Saving Plan for their EC2s. 1 or 3 year commit, no upfront vs all upfront, etc. A customer at the size of Amazon using AWS would have private pricing arrangement and an EDP.
> There’s the internal chargeback costs that AWS charges Amazon for services that would be subject to Do they do this? I have asked some friends who are developers at AWS and both told me that they don't worry or even know what their usage costs. But that's just anecdote; perhaps their boss knows.
I would ABSOLUTELY say that, at a minimum, every director or principal engineer needs to be familiar with costs and _should_ understand their P&L. Senior engineers and line managers probably/should have a passing familiarity or consideration. Individual random SDEs may not as its not their primary business function or deliverable and someone else is ultimately responsible.
Disclosure: Principal at AWS, opinions are my own.
Even if AWS treats Amazon like any customer the article is off by a factor of 30-60%. RIs for their RDS instances. Saving Plan for their EC2s. 1 or 3 year commit, no upfront vs all upfront, etc. A customer at the size of Amazon using AWS would have private pricing arrangement and an EDP.
You wouldn’t commit for 3 years for increased resources of a single day.
> There’s the internal chargeback costs that AWS charges Amazon for services that would be subject to Do they do this? I have asked some friends who are developers at AWS and both told me that they don't worry or even know what their usage costs. But that's just anecdote; perhaps their boss knows.
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?…
Yeah, those numbers struck me as well. At 375 million items sold, that's about 0.5GB storage and 2GB transfer per item .
After looking at screen after screen of no-name garbage on Prime Day, I gave up. I suspect that there are tons of people like me. In other words, we only contributed to the numerator, not the denominator.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They’ve a/b tested it to death
Once a metric becomes a target for optimization, it often loses its value as an indicator of a larger goal. People who obsess over A/B tests rarely understand that.