Prime Day is Amazon's global shopping event exclusively for Amazon Prime members, offering great deals, events, and exclusive content. Running an event of this magnitude on the AWS Cloud offers many unique challenges. The Infrastructure Readiness Team for Prime Day 2017 focused on helping Amazon teams realize operational and executional efficiencies so they could reduce costs and ensure event readiness. Join us for an overview and Q&A of lessons learned from our largest event, including event readiness, how to support infrastructure events at scale, communication planning, building escalation paths with unknown issues, and more.

1. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
How Amazon Scales Infrastructure
to Handle Billions of Transactions
on Prime Day
B r i a n H e r m a n a n d P a t r i c k O ’ B r i a n t
E N T 3 3 7

2. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Your company Cloud IT team AWS Account team
Customer engagement with AWS

3. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS
Account Team
Amazon as a customer of AWS
Infrastructure
Capacity
Management

4. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Planning Controllership Fulfillment Rapid Response
Brian’s role with Amazon

5. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Strategy Alignment Solutions Support
Patrick’s role with AWS

6. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Prime Day
A brief history…

7. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

8. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

9. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

10. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
3 normal days in Japan

11. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Prime Day
begins in
Japan
Prime Day Japan 2015Projection for Prime Day

12. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Prime Day Japan 2015

13. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

14. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Website Orders
EC2 Instances
Forecasted uplift (21%)

15. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Website Orders
EC2 Instances
Forecasted uplift (21%)

16. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

17. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

18. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Prime Day.next
Double Down: Deals, Data, Delight (and no negative Social)

19. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

20. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
• Biggest day in history!
• 60% growth YoY
• Tens of millions of shoppers, 50% more than 2016
• More people joined Prime than any single day in Amazon history
• Sold 3.5M toys, 1M pairs of shoes, 200k dresses
Prime Day 2017 Press Highlights

21. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Prime Day 2017 Growth
1MEC2 Instances52PBEBS Storage 50% YoY
12.9MPeak DynamoDB Requests/Sec
Over 200
Amazon.com teams
60%YoY Event Growth
3.34TDynamoDB Requests
80Native AWS Services
24,866
AWS Accounts
419BCloudTrail calls

22. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Elastic is the new normal
Holiday
2015
Holiday
2016
Prime Day
2017
Prime Day
2016
Holiday
2014
Prime Day
2015

23. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Best practices from 6 big events
3 Prime Days, 3 holiday seasons, 0 outages, we must be doing something right

24. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
What makes Amazon.com unique?
25% YoY growth
Over 80 native AWS services
Amazon.com is a loose federation of
hundreds of independent companies
Exponential Growth
AWS Breadth & Depth
Decentralized and Distributed
Over 18,000 software developers globallySheer Size
All in on AWSStage of Adoption

25. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Infrastructure Event Management (IEM)
A short-term,
highly focused
AWS Support
engagement to
provide
architectural and
scaling guidance,
and real-time
support for a
planned event.
Preparation
Meetings
Operational
Runbooks
Diagrams &
Traffic Flow

26. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Infrastructure Event Management Timeline
Prepare Event Review
Complete IEM Planning Doc
Identify Critical Path Items
Staff “War Room”
Monitor Infrastructure
Emergency Scaling
React as Necessary
1-2 months 1-3 days 1-3 weeks
Architecture Reviews
Limits | Capacity
& Runbook Creation
Scaling
Final Checks
Load Testing
Game Days
Post Event Recap
Descaling
Return to Normal
Plan
Kick off IEM
Business
Forecasts
Into
Capacity
Forecasts
1-2 months
Test
2-3 months

27. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS Well Architected
General Design Principles
Five Principles of the
Well Architected Framework
1. Security
2. Reliability
3. Performance Efficiency
4. Cost Optimization
5. Operational Excellence
P r e p a r i n g f o r a s c a l i n g e v e n t
Prepare Event ReviewPlan Test

28. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
1 week Event2 weeks3 weeks4 weeks5 weeks Event+1 Event+26 weeks7 weeks8 weeks
organic growth
weekly readiness reviews
A n a t o m y o f a s c a l i n g e v e n t
9 weeks
organic growth
Prepare Event ReviewPlan Test

29. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
1 week Event2 weeks3 weeks4 weeks5 weeks Event+1 Event+26 weeks7 weeks8 weeks
organic growth
weekly readiness reviews
A n a t o m y o f a s c a l i n g e v e n t
9 weeks
organic growth service scaling
and testing
3x weekly reviews
Prepare Event ReviewPlan Test

30. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
1 week Event2 weeks3 weeks4 weeks5 weeks Event+1 Event+26 weeks7 weeks8 weeks
organic growth
weekly readiness reviews
A n a t o m y o f a s c a l i n g e v e n t
9 weeks
organic growth service scaling
and testing
“Game Days”
end-to-end
testing & tuning
3x weekly reviews daily reviews
Prepare Event ReviewPlan Test

31. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
1 week Event2 weeks3 weeks4 weeks5 weeks Event+1 Event+26 weeks7 weeks8 weeks
organic growth
weekly readiness reviews
A n a t o m y o f a s c a l i n g e v e n t
9 weeks
organic growth service scaling
and testing
“Game Days”
end-to-end
testing & tuning
3x weekly reviews daily reviews
we’re
ready
Prepare Event ReviewPlan Test

32. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
1 week Event2 weeks3 weeks4 weeks5 weeks Event+1 Event+26 weeks7 weeks8 weeks
organic growth
weekly readiness reviews
A n a t o m y o f a s c a l i n g e v e n t
9 weeks
organic growth service scaling
and testing
“Game Days”
end-to-end
testing & tuning
3x weekly reviews daily reviews war room
we’re
ready
Prime Day
surprises
Prepare Event ReviewPlan Test

33. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
1 week Event2 weeks3 weeks4 weeks5 weeks Event+1 Event+26 weeks7 weeks8 weeks
organic growth
weekly readiness reviews
A n a t o m y o f a s c a l i n g e v e n t
9 weeks
organic growth service scaling
and testing
“Game Days”
end-to-end
testing & tuning
descaling organic
growth
3x weekly reviews daily reviews war room
we’re
ready
Prime Day
surprises
Prepare Event ReviewPlan Test

34. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
1 week Event2 weeks3 weeks4 weeks5 weeks Event+1 Event+26 weeks7 weeks8 weeks
organic growth
weekly readiness reviews
A n a t o m y o f a s c a l i n g e v e n t
9 weeks
organic growth service scaling
and testing
“Game Days”
end-to-end
testing & tuning
descaling organic
growth
3x weekly reviews daily reviews war room
we’re
ready
Prime Day
surprises
Prepare Event ReviewPlan Test

35. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Post Event Review
What worked well?Descale instances
Reset service limits
RecapReviewReset
Aggregate data
and identify trends

36. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Q&A

37. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Top Tips

38. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
BRIAN’S TOP 1. Plan your event in advance

39. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
BRIAN’S TOP 1. Plan your event in advance
2. Contact your AWS account team
about an IEM engagement

40. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
BRIAN’S TOP 1. Plan your event in advance
2. Contact your AWS account team
about an IEM engagement
3. Get your services ready

41. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
BRIAN’S TOP 1. Plan your event in advance
2. Contact your AWS account team
about an IEM engagement
3. Get your services ready
4. Conduct readiness reviews

42. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
BRIAN’S TOP 1. Plan your event in advance
2. Contact your AWS account team
about an IEM engagement
3. Get your services ready
4. Conduct readiness reviews
5. Hold “Game Days”

43. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
BRIAN’S TOP 1. Plan your event in advance
2. Contact your AWS account team
about an IEM engagement
3. Get your services ready
4. Conduct readiness reviews
5. Hold “Game Days”
6. Run an event “War Room”

44. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
BRIAN’S TOP 1. Plan your event in advance
2. Contact your AWS account team
about an IEM engagement
3. Get your services ready
4. Conduct readiness reviews
5. Hold “Game Days”
6. Run an event “War Room”
7. Your event is a training ground
for the unexpected.
Don’t waste the opportunity!

45. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
THANK YOU!
B r i a n H e r m a n & P a t r i c k O ’ B r i a n t