Prime Day 2021 – Two Chart-Topping Days

In what has now become an annual tradition (check out my 2016, 2017, 2019, and 2020 posts for a look back), I am happy to share some of the metrics from this year’s Prime Day and to tell you how AWS helped to make it happen.

This year I bought all sorts of useful goodies including a Toshiba 43 Inch Smart TV that I plan to use as a MagicMirror, some watering cans, and a Dremel Rotary Tool Kit for my workshop.

Powered by AWS
As in years past, AWS played a critical role in making Prime Day a success. A multitude of two-pizza teams worked together to make sure that every part of our infrastructure was scaled, tested, and ready to serve our customers. Here are a few examples:

Amazon EC2 – Our internal measure of compute power is an NI, or a normalized instance. We use this unit to allow us to make meaningful comparisons across different types and sizes of EC2 instances. For Prime Day 2021, we increased our number of NIs by 12.5%. Interestingly enough, due to increased efficiency (more on that in a moment), we actually used about 6,000 fewer physical servers than we did in Cyber Monday 2020.

Graviton2 Instances – Graviton2-powered EC2 instances supported 12 core retail services. This was our first peak event that was supported at scale by the AWS Graviton2 instances, and is a strong indicator that the Arm architecture is well-suited to the data center.

An internal service called Datapath is a key part of the Amazon site. It is highly optimized for our peculiar needs, and supports lookups, queries, and joins across structured blobs of data. After an in-depth evaluation and consideration of all of the alternatives, the team decided to port Datapath to Graviton and to run it on a three-Region cluster composed of over 53,200 C6g instances.

At this scale, the price-performance advantage of the Graviton2 of up to 40% versus the comparable fifth-generation x86-based instances, along with the 20% lower cost, turns into a big win for us and for our customers. As a bonus, the power efficiency of the Graviton2 helps us to achieve our goals for addressing climate change. If you are thinking about moving your workloads to Graviton2, be sure to study our very detailed Getting Started with AWS Graviton2 document, and also consider entering the Graviton Challenge! You can also use Graviton2 database instances on Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora; read about Key Considerations in Moving to Graviton2 for Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora Databases to learn more.

Amazon CloudFront – Fast, efficient content delivery is essential when millions of customers are shopping and making purchases. Amazon CloudFront handled a peak load of over 290 million HTTP requests per minute, for a total of over 600 billion HTTP requests during Prime Day.

Amazon Simple Queue Service – The fulfillment process for every order depends on Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). This year, traffic set a new record, processing 47.7 million messages per second at the peak.

Amazon Elastic Block Store – In preparation for Prime Day, the team added 159 petabytes of EBS storage. The resulting fleet handled 11.1 trillion requests per day and transferred 614 petabytes per day.

Amazon Aurora – Amazon Fulfillment Technologies (AFT) powers physical fulfillment for purchases made on Amazon. On Prime Day, 3,715 instances of AFT’s PostgreSQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora processed 233 billion transactions, stored 1,595 terabytes of data, and transferred 615 terabytes of data

Amazon DynamoDB – DynamoDB powers multiple high-traffic Amazon properties and systems including Alexa, the Amazon.com sites, and all Amazon fulfillment centers. Over the course of the 66-hour Prime Day, these sources made trillions of API calls while maintaining high availability with single-digit millisecond performance, and peaking at 89.2 million requests per second.

Prepare to Scale
As I have detailed in my previous posts, rigorous preparation is key to the success of Prime Day and our other large-scale events. If your are preparing for a similar event of your own, I can heartily recommend AWS Infrastructure Event Management. As part of an IEM engagement, AWS experts will provide you with architectural and operational guidance that will help you to execute your event with confidence.

— Jeff;