Amazon Prime Day 2024: A Record-Breaking Event Powered by AWS
Amazon Prime Day 2024, held on July 17-18, has set new benchmarks, becoming the biggest Prime Day shopping event in Amazon’s history. Prime members from around the globe took advantage of millions of deals, saving billions across more than 35 diverse categories. The scale and success of this event were made possible by the robust infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
A Personal Experience with Prime Day 2024
As a resident of South Korea, I found myself in Seattle during Prime Day 2024, attending the AWS Heroes Summit. This provided me a unique opportunity to experience the event firsthand. I signed up for a Prime membership and used Rufus, Amazon’s AI-powered conversational shopping assistant. Rufus made it incredibly easy to search for items and make purchases efficiently. Additionally, many Prime members, including myself, opted to consolidate deliveries, which significantly reduced the number of delivery trips, thereby lowering carbon emissions.
AWS: The Backbone of Prime Day
AWS has long been the technological backbone that makes such large-scale events possible. AWS powers the Amazon website and mobile app, ensuring seamless operations even during peak shopping times. This year, AWS scaled its resources significantly to meet the heightened demand.
Amazon EC2 and AI Chips
To handle the vast number of requests and ensure smooth operations, Amazon deployed over 80,000 Inferentia and Trainium chips, specifically designed for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Additionally, more than 250,000 AWS Graviton chips were used to power over 5,800 distinct Amazon.com services, which is twice the number compared to 2023.
Amazon EBS Storage
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provisioned 264 PiB (Pebibytes) of storage for Prime Day 2024, marking a 62% increase from 2023. The performance metrics were equally impressive, with Amazon.com experiencing a 64% increase in read/write I/O operations and an 81% increase in data transfer compared to the previous year.
Database Services
Amazon Aurora, running PostgreSQL-compatible and MySQL-compatible editions, processed over 376 billion transactions and stored nearly 3,000 terabytes of data. Meanwhile, Amazon DynamoDB, which powers high-traffic properties like Alexa and Amazon fulfillment centers, handled tens of trillions of API calls, maintaining high availability and single-digit millisecond response times.
Real-Time Data Processing
Amazon ElastiCache served more than quadrillion requests on Prime Day, peaking at over 1 trillion requests per minute. This level of demand requires an incredibly resilient and scalable caching service, which ElastiCache provided seamlessly.
Analytics and Monitoring
Amazon QuickSight, AWS’s BI (Business Intelligence) service, had one dashboard that saw 107,000 unique hits and delivered over 1.6 million queries. Amazon SageMaker, a machine learning service, processed over 145 billion inference requests, showcasing the power of AI in real-time analytics.
Communication and Security
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) sent 30% more emails during Prime Day 2024 compared to 2023, achieving a delivery rate of 99.23%. On the security front, Amazon GuardDuty monitored nearly 6 trillion log events per hour, ensuring the platform remained secure amidst the increased activity.
Event Logging and Content Delivery
AWS CloudTrail processed over 976 billion events, while Amazon CloudFront handled a peak load of over 500 million HTTP requests per minute, totaling over 1.3 trillion HTTP requests during the event. This represented a 30% increase from Prime Day 2023.
Preparing for Scale
The success of Prime Day is a testament to rigorous preparation and testing. AWS ran 733 Fault Injection Service (FIS) experiments to test the resilience of Amazon.com, ensuring it remained highly available during the event. This level of preparation is crucial for any business planning large-scale events or product launches.
AWS Countdown: A Support Program
For businesses preparing for critical events, AWS offers a support program known as AWS Countdown. This program helps assess operational readiness, identify risks, and plan capacity using proven strategies developed by AWS experts. Legal Zoom, for example, successfully migrated 450 servers with minimal issues using AWS Countdown and continues to leverage the program for launching SaaS applications.
Conclusion
Amazon Prime Day 2024 has set new records, and the numbers speak for themselves. The event’s success underscores the importance of robust infrastructure and meticulous preparation. As we look forward to next year, it’s clear that AWS will continue to play a pivotal role in supporting Amazon’s ambitious goals.
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(Note: This article is based on the original blog post from AWS and has been rephrased and expanded for clarity and additional context.)
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