Ask HN: Why isn't Amazon.com impacted by AWS outages?

5 points by trevoragilbert 210 days ago | 11 comments

I've noticed over the years whenever there's an AWS outage, Amazon.com doesn't seem to be impacted. My assumption is that they'd be one of the first to go down. Any idea why?

runjake 210 days ago |

It was impacted. Amazon.com was unusable for me this morning. All I could get loaded was the header section and a blank page saying "Something went wrong."

binsquare 210 days ago | |

Same here, couldn't add things to cart or see the prices for a lot of things.

bigmutant 209 days ago | | |

DynamoDB is used *everywhere* in AMZN Retail, this is absolutely not surprising. Plus the vast majority of internal Services are using EC2 in the form of Apollo/ECS. So OP probably hit some parts of the site that are hosted in us-west-2. For all I know they started routing all requests for us-east-1 traffic to other DCs, figuring latency is a fine trade-off for availability

ibejoeb 210 days ago |

No idea if it's related, but this is the first time I've seen "We're sorry, Customer Service chat and phone lines are not currently available at the moment."

I've been getting message all morning about delivery delays. All were supposed to be delivered today and now they're anywhere between tomorrow and thursday.

JustExAWS 209 days ago |

Source: Former AWS employee. For the most part Amazon Retail doesn’t run on AWS infrastructure and doesn’t use AWS services. I’m simplifying a little bit. But Amazon (the company) runs two sets of infrastructure “AWS” and “CDO” (or COE I don’t remember).

It’s an old wives tale that AWS came out of “excess capacity” from Amazon Retail.

bigmutant 209 days ago | |

To clarify, most of CDO (Consumer Devices Other) does run on AWS in the sense that NAWS is the target state, MAWS is legacy and actively (slowly) being migrated off of. CDO (including Alexa) has been using DynamoDB/Lambda/Kinesis/SQS etc forever, its just the compute and kind-of network layers that are still MAWS. Even then, a large part of CDO has moved from Apollo to ECS/FarGate/whatever unholy Hex or DataPath thing they're pushing these days

Source: Ex-AMZN

VirusNewbie 209 days ago |

I can't get any filtering functionality right now. The question isn't "why wasn't it impacted" and more like, why is it still degraded?

PaulHoule 210 days ago |

I was having trouble with the store this morning.

walterbell 210 days ago |

Some functions were down, e.g. order history.

Showfom 209 days ago |

It really depends on which data center you're connecting to, a few regions in the US were impacted earlier this morning.

smartician 210 days ago |

Multi-region failover?