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Werner Vogels did an on-stage interview recently at the Kings of Code conference in Amsterdam. A question from the audience was: "Does the Amazon shopping site

Werner Vogels did an on-stage interview recently at the Kings of Code conference in Amsterdam. A question from the audience was: "Does the Amazon shopping site run on AWS as well or on a more private/shielded AWS-cloud?". Werner answered that they use the same infrastructure as everybody else and that they could not justify doing anything else. It gave me tremendous trust in the AWS platform.

ryanpers 15y ago
when i left amazon in 2006 that was MOST DEF not true. well not the backendy parts of amazon. maybe some of the webservers were, but i somehow doubt it.
nirvana 15y ago
This was not true at all, at least thru 2007. At that time, there were some minor services that made some use of AWS services, mostly newer things that had been created after AWS was created. AWS was not available to developers within Amazon to use at any time before the day it was publicly launched. At least not on a broad basis, and none of the main Amazon.com services ran on it in 2007. They did share some data centers, however. And I guess data centers are "infrastructure". I was in a position to know this because I had my hands deep in the retail site as part of my job.
- wouterinho 15y ago
  Interesting... any current Amazon employee that can confirm/deny this? Perhaps things have changed since 2007.
  - jasoncrawford 15y ago
    When I left in early 2007 they were working on the transition. More recently I heard that they were substantially if not totally on the AWS infrastructure. So if Werner said it recently it probably is true.
  - nirvana 15y ago
    I'm sure sometime in 2007 or 2008 a directive went down that people had to build new stuff on AWS. EC2 is a reasonably good fit for much of the Amazon.com code, as it's just generic hardware. I'm sure in the past 4 years more and more stuff has been written to use S3 as a data store. The core stuff, Gurupa, etc, would have to be re-architected to work with things like SQS and other services. I'm not saying that nobody in Amazon wanted to use AWS, just that we didn't know about it until the press release, and so there wasn't any opportunity to use it... and of course, all the code from the 1990s was built in a different way so it would have been nontrivial to migrate it.
  - freedompeace 15y ago
    Amazon Silk uses the EC2 infrastructure -- they explicitly state this in their video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u7F_56WhHk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u7F_56WhHk )
  - aphexairlines 15y ago
    We migrated the US retail rendering fleet to AWS last year. simonw posted a link about it elsewhere on this thread.
    - nirvana 15y ago
      So, about 4 years after it was publicly claimed to be running on AWS.
      - nikcub 15y ago
        yes but we all figured this out earlier because EC2 and S3 downtime would never correspond with Amazon.com downtime - which made it obvious that the 'use the infrastructure we use' line was complete bullshit.
        ceejayoz 15y ago
        Not necessarily. Netflix managed to survive EC2 and S3 downtimes by architecting around the (mostly known) pitfalls - multiple regions, S3 isn't HA, etc.
  - jonjenk 15y ago
    This presentation contains some fairly detailed information about the amazon.com migration to AWS. tl;dr The organic migration to AWS started in 2006 and continues to this day. http://psav.mediasite.com/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=7ab95f6a5d4a479fa512270356a1e8a81d http://psav.mediasite.com/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=7ab95f6a5d4...
  - simplekoala 15y ago
    I was with Amazon in the past. I am no authority but I would come to a similar conclusion. Till end of 07, Amazon.com barely used AWS
- syaramak 15y ago
  Some of the vendor facing systems I worked on definitely were not on AWS by the time I left in 2008. And there wasn't any plan on the map to migrate them at the time. But that was 3 years ago.
- csarva 15y ago
  At AWS Summit back in June they said that all (US only?) pages are now rendered via servers on AWS. The databases are still big-iron type boxes due to them being on, IIRC, Oracle and I/O being what it is on EC2.
simonw 15y ago
Here's a presentation about Amazon.com moving to AWS as of November 2010: http://lanyrd.com/2011/aws-cloud-tour-2011-sydney/sgqfb/ http://lanyrd.com/2011/aws-cloud-tour-2011-sydney/sgqfb/
rtuck 15y ago
I remember the question more in terms of "Does AWS give preferential treatment to Amazon vs other customers?" to which the answer was, of course, "No, it's not workable at such a scale." I imagine there was a large amount of hardware sharing early on and that could be construed as sharing infrastructure; a number of the answers in that session were rather evasive.
deleted 15y ago
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ryanpers 15y ago

when i left amazon in 2006 that was MOST DEF not true. well not the backendy parts of amazon. maybe some of the webservers were, but i somehow doubt it.

nirvana 15y ago

This was not true at all, at least thru 2007. At that time, there were some minor services that made some use of AWS services, mostly newer things that had been created after AWS was created. AWS was not available to developers within Amazon to use at any time before the day it was publicly launched. At least not on a broad basis, and none of the main Amazon.com services ran on it in 2007. They did share some data centers, however. And I guess data centers are "infrastructure". I was in a position to know this because I had my hands deep in the retail site as part of my job.

wouterinho 15y ago
Interesting... any current Amazon employee that can confirm/deny this? Perhaps things have changed since 2007.
- jasoncrawford 15y ago
  When I left in early 2007 they were working on the transition. More recently I heard that they were substantially if not totally on the AWS infrastructure. So if Werner said it recently it probably is true.
- nirvana 15y ago
  I'm sure sometime in 2007 or 2008 a directive went down that people had to build new stuff on AWS. EC2 is a reasonably good fit for much of the Amazon.com code, as it's just generic hardware. I'm sure in the past 4 years more and more stuff has been written to use S3 as a data store. The core stuff, Gurupa, etc, would have to be re-architected to work with things like SQS and other services. I'm not saying that nobody in Amazon wanted to use AWS, just that we didn't know about it until the press release, and so there wasn't any opportunity to use it... and of course, all the code from the 1990s was built in a different way so it would have been nontrivial to migrate it.
- freedompeace 15y ago
  Amazon Silk uses the EC2 infrastructure -- they explicitly state this in their video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u7F_56WhHk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u7F_56WhHk )
- aphexairlines 15y ago
  We migrated the US retail rendering fleet to AWS last year. simonw posted a link about it elsewhere on this thread.
  - nirvana 15y ago
    So, about 4 years after it was publicly claimed to be running on AWS.
    - nikcub 15y ago
      yes but we all figured this out earlier because EC2 and S3 downtime would never correspond with Amazon.com downtime - which made it obvious that the 'use the infrastructure we use' line was complete bullshit.
      - ceejayoz 15y ago
        Not necessarily. Netflix managed to survive EC2 and S3 downtimes by architecting around the (mostly known) pitfalls - multiple regions, S3 isn't HA, etc.
- jonjenk 15y ago
  This presentation contains some fairly detailed information about the amazon.com migration to AWS. tl;dr The organic migration to AWS started in 2006 and continues to this day. http://psav.mediasite.com/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=7ab95f6a5d4a479fa512270356a1e8a81d http://psav.mediasite.com/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=7ab95f6a5d4...
- simplekoala 15y ago
  I was with Amazon in the past. I am no authority but I would come to a similar conclusion. Till end of 07, Amazon.com barely used AWS
syaramak 15y ago
Some of the vendor facing systems I worked on definitely were not on AWS by the time I left in 2008. And there wasn't any plan on the map to migrate them at the time. But that was 3 years ago.
csarva 15y ago
At AWS Summit back in June they said that all (US only?) pages are now rendered via servers on AWS. The databases are still big-iron type boxes due to them being on, IIRC, Oracle and I/O being what it is on EC2.

simonw 15y ago

Here's a presentation about Amazon.com moving to AWS as of November 2010: http://lanyrd.com/2011/aws-cloud-tour-2011-sydney/sgqfb/ http://lanyrd.com/2011/aws-cloud-tour-2011-sydney/sgqfb/

rtuck 15y ago

I remember the question more in terms of "Does AWS give preferential treatment to Amazon vs other customers?" to which the answer was, of course, "No, it's not workable at such a scale." I imagine there was a large amount of hardware sharing early on and that could be construed as sharing infrastructure; a number of the answers in that session were rather evasive.

deleted 15y ago

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