How Amazon.com use AWS?

Today Amazon.com is an online retailer, manufacturer of electronic book readers, and Web services provider that became the iconic example of electronic commerce. Its headquarters are in Seattle, Washington.

History of Amazon

Amazon started in 1995 as a book retailer, it was a site that only sold books. Within a month of starting the company, it already shipped books to over 40 different countries. Since then, Amazon has become one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies.

How exactly did Amazon pull off such impressive results?

Innovation:

Amazon’s success largely stems from its innovative technologies and practices, many of which were championed by its CEO, Jeff Bezos. Consider the Echo, Amazon’s impressive voice command device. The echo can be used to play songs, research your favorite sports teams, and even check the weather with a few spoken words. This innovative technology was a huge investment for the e-commerce giant -one that encouraged the development of such exceptional results. Over 22 million Echo units were sold in 2017 alone.

Amazon’s progressive mindset doesn’t always bear fruit, but accomplishments like the Echo prove that innovation can yield impressive results for e-commerce companies.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Because of its commitment to world-class customer service, Amazon has developed a range of helpful tools users can employ to track packages and quickly return or exchange ordered items, bringing simplicity and convenience to their online shopping experiences. Amazon’s Customer Service team has won multiple awards for its dedication to preventing and swiftly addressing problems for customers. One of Amazon’s overarching missions is to become the planet’s most customer-centric company and the brand’s dedication to this goal has paid dividends.

EXECUTION

Amazon gets everything right when executing customer orders. They select products and services that customers want and need and best places for distribution centers across the globe that allow them to quickly ship products. Amazon also has excellent vendor relationships that allow them to offer customers discounted pricing. They’re also looking to implement brick-and-mortar stores that will have the capability of same-day-delivery via drones!

DIVERSIFICATION

Starting off as an online bookstore, Amazon now offers everything from soup to nuts. Literally, a search of the site reveals over 3,000 listings for vegetable soup. Search the term “nuts” and you’ll see over 37,000 results. Amazon now carries products in music, books, electronics, health and beauty, automotive, grocery, and clothing. Business owners can contract with Amazon’s network of pros to get IT support, furniture assembly, and even A/V services. By diversifying its offerings, Amazon is continuously driving reach and relevance.

OUTSTANDING USER EXPERIENCES

A strong UX (Amazon’s User Experience) makes it easy for e-commerce customers to find what they’re looking for. That’s why Amazon employs a full UX team comprised of professionals in everything from user research and interaction design to web development. These UX experts collaborate with Amazon’s engineers, product managers, and executives to create seamless user experiences that drive customer conversions.

MERGING DESIGN WITH CONTENT

It’s no secret that long-tail content is a huge component of e-commerce CEO. You need large amounts of keyword-rich copy to increase the visibility of a page on search engines and which is why Amazon uses lengthy product descriptions and FAQs on its product pages. However, take a look at any product page on Amazon, and you’ll notice that this long-tail content doesn’t adversely affect its flow or UX. Amazon’s product copy is given less priority than important CTAs (such as the “Add to Cart” and “Buy Now” buttons). This seamless merging of design and content ensures that Amazon pages attract and convert relevant web traffic.

AN “IN IT TO WIN IT” MINDSET

Does anybody really remember when Amazon was unprofitable? If you’ve been around for a while, you might remember Bezos’ warning to investors that it would be a long time before they would see a return. Back in 1997, he told Inc. Magazine that Amazon would be unprofitable for a very long time. His “in it to win it” mindset kept the company pushing through new strategies until 2003 — when the company posted its first profit. No matter how you look at it, Amazon has grown up from a little online bookstore to an industry giant. You could even say Amazon created the industry for total domination.

Overview of AWS

Cloud computing has become an integral part of businesses across all industries. AWS is the most popular form. It improves efficiency and provides relief for any number of business practices.

Back in the 2000s, businesses were completely dependent on purchased servers, and those servers had limited functionality and steep prices. Plus, a functioning server required countless validations. The more growth businesses experienced, the more servers and optimization practices they needed. Acquiring those items proved inefficient, and, sometimes, prohibitively expensive.

The advantages of AWS have solved many of those problems. Companies using AWS have servers available instantly, and AWS provides various workloads, increased storage options, and enhanced security measures,

What is AWS?

To be able to answer “What is AWS?”, you must first understand that it’s a cloud provider. Among other features, cloud providers grant more storage flexibility and enhanced security measures. They also contain features you’d find at a local data center, like security, higher computing capacity, and database construction. Depending on your location, you can get other features like content caching.

One of the advantages of AWS is that you get all 175+ cloud services on a pay-as-you-go basis. This means that you pay only for the services you use. And it works on a relative scale. That means the less you use it, the less you pay. And the more you use it, the less you pay per unit. (i.e., The price of each unit goes down with each new purchase.)

Earlier AWS used to charge on an hourly basis but now AWS charges on a minute basis.

That’s not all. Other advantages of AWS relate to the applications associated with it.

• The applications are reliable because they run on a safe and reliable infrastructure.
• Their on-demand infrastructure allows greater scalability
• The design options available on the cloud permit large flexibility

Reading about real-world uses (and users) of Amazon Web Services (AWS) can help you understand what kinds of interesting and innovative things can be done with AWS. And it should come as no surprise to you that Amazon is a proud user of Amazon Web Services.

A Brief History of AWS

AWS was launched in 2002. The company wanted to sell its unused infrastructure as a service, or as an offering to customers.

The idea was met with enthusiasm. Amazon launched its first AWS product in 2006. Four years later, in 2012, Amazon hosted a huge event focused on collecting customer input about

AWS. The company still holds similar events, such as Reinvent, which allows customers to share feedback about AWS.

In 2015, Amazon announced that its AWS revenue had reached $7.8 billion. Between then and 2016, AWS launched measures that helped customers migrate their services to AWS.

Those measures, along with the public’s growing appreciation of AWS’s features, induced further economic growth. Amazon’s revenue increased to $12.2 billion in 2016.

Today, AWS offers customers 160 products and services. That number will likely increase, given the rate at which Amazon builds upon and tweaks AWS.

Let us now improve our understanding of what AWS is by looking into the services of the amazon web services (AWS).

Understanding AWS and Its Services

AWS Services

Since it came into existence, AWS has become an essential cloud computing technology. Here are some of AWS’s essential offerings:

Amazon S3

This tool is used for internet back up, and it’s the cheapest storage option in the object-storage category. The best part: you can retrieve stored data from almost anywhere whenever you need it.

AWS Data Transfer Products

As the name suggests, these are migration, data collection, and data transfer products that help you collect data seamlessly. They also enable you to monitor and analyze data in real-time.

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

This provides a secure and resizable computing capacity based on your needs. The service is designed to make web-scale cloud computing more accessible.

Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Services)

This is a notification tool that delivers messages to a large number of subscribers through email or SMS. You can send alarms, service notifications, and other messages intended to call attention to important information.

Amazon KMS (Key Management System)

This is a security tool that uses 256-bit encryption for your data. It also safeguards it from hackers and cyber attacks.

Amazon Lambda

This service runs your code depending on specific events and manages the dependent resources. You need neither managing nor provisioning servers, and how much you pay depends on how long it takes to execute your code. It saves a lot of money compared with services that charge hourly rates.

Route 53

This is a DNS service in the cloud that doesn’t require you to maintain a separate DNS account. It’s designed to provide businesses with a reliable and cost-effective method to route users to internet applications.

After having learned what is AWS, let us next find out the benefits of Amazon web services.

How Does AWS Make Lives Easier?

Let’s use the example of Unilever, a giant in the world of consumer goods.

Unilever had a problem: It needed a faster time-to-market and a standardized environment. The company is spread across 190 countries, and it was relying on digital marketing for its products. Its existing legacy local environment proved useless, unable to cater to changing IT demands.

Unilever moved a part of its business to AWS, and since then, rollouts have been smooth, provisioning applications have become more reliable, and even provisioning infrastructure has improved.

The company could also do everything in push-button scaling, and AWS’s safe backups ensure that all the company’s data is secure and continuously accessible.

Today, Unilever is growing with AWS, thanks to features such as swift deployment rollouts, secure backups, and the ability to generate real-time reports.

How Amazon.com manages its data?

Amazon.com is the world’s largest online retailer. In 2011, Amazon.com switched from tape backup to using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for backing up the majority of its Oracle databases.

How is AWS better than the previous data management system?

Tape media management, media costs, 3rd party offsite contracts, and the sheer volume of data growth makes tape backup challenging in any organization. The AWS Storage Gateway service offers a Tape Gateway configuration that gives you an alternative to physical backup tapes that fits seamlessly into your existing backup process. Now you have the local performance of disk, a low-cost highly scalable cloud back-end, and minimal disruption to existing systems.

This strategy reduces complexity and capital expenditures, provides faster backup and restore performance, eliminates tape capacity planning for backup and archive, and frees up administrative staff for higher value operations. The company was able to replace their backup tape infrastructure with cloud-based Amazon S3 storage, eliminate backup software, and experienced a 12X performance improvement, reducing restore time from around 15 hours to 2.5 hours in select scenarios.

You might say, “Well, of course, Amazon is going to eat its own dog food :) ”. That’s not the case, however.

Amazon.com didn’t immediately leap into the use of AWS when it first entered the market. Though both businesses are part of the same company, each has its own goals and measurements, and Amazon.com (the e-commerce division) wasn’t going to endanger its own business just to make AWS feel good.

Just as any customer would, Amazon.com carefully evaluated AWS, thoroughly tested it, and then reached a decision to migrate to it, with enough supporting evidence to justify its decision.

As of October 2010, say 2011.. Amazon.com hosts all its web servers in AWS; about a year later, the international divisions of Amazon made the same transition.

If you think about it, this task is truly impressive. All traffic at Amazon.com, including its international counterparts, flows across AWS. Amazon.com is by far the largest e-commerce company, with over $60 billion of revenue in 2012.

Enormous amounts of web traffic flow through Amazon.com every day, say hundreds of millions, if not billions, of page views per day. AWS supports all of it — and Amazon.com is only one of its customers!

This achievement is all the more impressive in the context of Amazon .com’s sales profile: Its yearly traffic is highly skewed toward the Christmas season,(the amazon .in is highly skewed towards the Diwali season) and AWS has to have sufficient capacity on hand to handle all that traffic — and all the traffic of its other customers, many of whom are also e-commerce companies that have seasonal sales profiles similar to those of Amazon.com.

The next time you hear someone dismiss AWS as a concept cooked up by a mere bookseller or as suitable only for small- and medium-sized businesses, keep in mind that just one of AWS’s customers is the largest e-commerce company in the world.

Why Amazon Web Services

Amazon.com initiated the evaluation of Amazon S3 for economic and performance improvements related to data backup. As part of that evaluation, they considered security, availability, and performance aspects of Amazon S3 backups. Amazon.com also executed a cost-benefit analysis to ensure that migration to Amazon S3 would be financially worthwhile. That cost-benefit analysis included the following elements:

• Performance advantage and cost competitiveness It was important that the overall costs of the backups did not increase. At the same time, Amazon.com required faster backup and recovery performance. The time and effort required for backup and for recovery operations proved to be a significant improvement over the tape, with restoring from Amazon S3 running from two to twelve times faster than a similar restore from tape. Amazon.com required any new backup medium to provide improved performance while maintaining or reducing overall costs. Backing up to on-premises disk-based storage would have improved performance, but missed on cost competitiveness. Amazon S3 Cloud based storage met both criteria.
• Greater durability and availability Amazon S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year. Amazon.com compared these figures with those observed from their tape infrastructure and determined that Amazon S3 offered significant improvement.
• Less operational friction Amazon.com DBAs had to evaluate whether Amazon S3 backups would be viable for their database backups. They determined that using Amazon S3 for backups was easy to implement because it worked seamlessly with Oracle RMAN.
• Strong data security. Amazon.com found that AWS met all of their requirements for physical security, security accreditations, and security processes, protecting data in flight, data at rest, and utilizing suitable encryption standards.

How does Amazon Web Services benefit Amazon.com?

With the migration to Amazon S3 well along the way to completion, Amazon.com has realized several benefits, including:

• Elimination of complex and time-consuming tape capacity planning. Amazon.com is growing larger and more dynamic each year. AWS has enabled Amazon.com to keep pace with this rapid expansion and to do so seamlessly. Amazon.com's business groups have had to write annual backup plans, quantifying the amount of tape storage that they plan to use for the year and the frequency with which they will use the tape resources. These plans are then used to charge each organization for their tape usage, spreading the cost among many teams. With Amazon S3, teams simply pay for what they use and are billed for their usage as they go. There are virtually no upper limits as to how much data can be stored in Amazon S3, and so there are no worries about running out of resources. For teams adopting Amazon S3 backups, the need for formal planning has been all but eliminated.
• Reduced capital expenditures. Amazon.com no longer needs to acquire tape robots, tape drives, tape inventory, data center space, networking gear, enterprise backup software, or predict future tape consumption. This eliminates the burden of budgeting for capital equipment well in advance as well as the capital expense.
• Immediate availability of data for restoring — no need to locate or retrieve physical tapes. Whenever a DBA needs to restore data from tape, they face delays. The tape backup software needs to read the tape catalog to find the correct files to restore, locate the correct tape, mount the tape, and read the data from it. In almost all cases the data is spread across multiple tapes, resulting in further delays. This, combined with contention for tape drives resulting from multiple users’ tape requests, slows the process down even more. This is especially severe during critical events such as a data center outage when many databases must be restored simultaneously and as soon as possible. None of these problems occur with Amazon S3. Data restores can begin immediately, with no waiting or tape queuing — and that means the database can be recovered much faster.
• Backing up a database to Amazon S3 can be two to twelve times faster than with tape drives. As one example, in a benchmark test, a DBA was able to restore 3.8 terabytes in 2.5 hours over gigabit Ethernet. This amounts to 25 gigabytes per minute or 422MB per second. In addition, since Amazon.com uses RMAN data compression, the effective restore rate was 3.37 gigabytes per second. This 2.5 hour compares to, conservatively, 10–15 hours that would be required to restore from tape.
• Easy implementation of Oracle RMAN backups to Amazon S3. The DBAs found it easy to start backing up their databases to Amazon S3. Directing Oracle RMAN backups to Amazon S3 requires only a configuration of the Oracle Secure Backup Cloud (SBC) module. The effort required to configure the Oracle SBC module amounted to an hour or less per database. After this one-time setup, the database backups were transparently redirected to Amazon S3.
• Durable data storage provided by Amazon S3, which is designed for 11 nines durability. On occasion, Amazon.com has experienced hardware failures with tape infrastructure — tapes that break, tape drives that fail, and robotic components that fail. Sometimes this happens when a DBA is trying to restore a database and dramatically increases the meantime to recover (MTTR). With the durability and availability of Amazon S3, these issues are no longer a concern.
• Freeing up valuable human resources. With tape infrastructure, Amazon.com had to seek out engineers who were experienced with very large tape backup installations — a specialized, vendor-specific skill set that is difficult to find. They also needed to hire data center technicians and dedicate them to problem-solving and troubleshooting hardware issues — replacing drives, shuffling tapes around, shipping and tracking tapes, and so on. Amazon S3 allowed them to free up these specialists from day-to-day operations so that they can work on more valuable, business-critical engineering tasks.
• Elimination of physical tape transport to an off-site location. Any company that has been storing Oracle backup data offsite should take a hard look at the costs involved in transporting, securing and storing their tapes offsite — these costs can be reduced or possibly eliminated by storing the data in Amazon S3.

As the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon.com continuously innovates in order to provide improved customer experience and offer products at the lowest possible prices. One such innovation has been to replace the tape with Amazon S3 storage for database backups. This innovation is one that can be easily replicated by other organizations that back up their Oracle databases to tape.