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The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

lastweekinaws.com

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Re: The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

#4

Post by cj »

mokarma wrote: post #2

Naive question: What are they using EBS for? It seems unnecessary given all the Databases. Is that just local caching for EC2's?

EBS is just a networked hard drive, so they could really be using it for anything storage related.

Is Amazon’s general architecture for their retail site publicly described anywhere?

Re: The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

#5

Post by yowlingcat »

mokarma wrote: post #2

Naive question: What are they using EBS for? It seems unnecessary given all the Databases. Is that just local caching for EC2's?

Well, not to answer your question with a question, but what would you imagine backs all of those database services? Or, said another way, I'm not sure Corey Quinn is mapping the cost dependency graph correctly by giving this breakdown as mutually exclusive (from the standpoint of AWS internally).

Re: The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

#8

Post by other_herbert »

fragmede wrote: post #3

Did any AWS customers experience unavailability during prime day, eg capacity issues launching instances, due to prime day taking precedence over other customers? If there are, they're under NDA so we'd never know.

You’ve talked me into running some load tests around and before these times… around thanksgiving I’ll give it a shot too… I wonder though if it’s just a redirection of traffic… if regular business sites are less busy because people are shopping it would just slightly shift the load from one “side” to the other

Hmmmm….

Re: The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

#9

Post by rurp »

> $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 strictly necessary in AWS.

I don't mean to be too negative though, it was a really interesting article. Pretty wild to think about spending $100m on infrastructure over two days and still making a bunch of profit.

Re: The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill

#10

Post by nonameiguess »

mokarma wrote: post #2

Naive question: What are they using EBS for? It seems unnecessary given all the Databases. Is that just local caching for EC2's?

At minimum, root volumes for the VMs. Theoretically, you could load immutable machine images from the network and run entirely off of in-memory filesystems if you persist nothing past instance shutdown (similar to how extremely cautious people might run Tails booted off USB on a laptop with no hard drive), but that won't actually save cost since memory is more expensive than disk anyway.
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