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July 29, 2004
Building the Amazon.com Platform
Listening to David Ballenber, Senior Principal Engineer at Amazon.com talking about
building the Amazon.com platform at OSCON 2004. The slides are broken into a few categories, just
taking down some notable statistics.
About
- Amazon.com is hiring engineers, David says he'd welcome resume after presentation
- want to be earth's biggest selection, most customer-centric company
- Amazon.com is ecommerce marketplace, outsourcing solution, development platform, tech company
- tens of millions of customers, hundreds of thousands of seller accounts
- 24% of units are sold by third-party
- large associates network
- offer third-party tech services, customer service, order fullfilment (Target, Borders, Nordstrom, NBA)
- 50,000 web services downloads - http://www.amazon.com/webservices
- in Holiday 2003, Amazon.com shipped more than 1 million packages in a day, 2 million units processed in a single day
Development
- Work hard at understanding customers and businesses
- Engineers are involved in entire process
- Building things never seen before to operate at scale never seen before
- Scalability isn't just in web-interface, David worked on the automated fulfillment process, had to build so me of the sorting systems because nothing scalable was available
- home page is optimized for relevance, targeting, history, latency, availability etc
- is built dynamically once customer hits the page
- Apache-based using HTML::Mason, ties into Amazon-built web platform sotware
- use service framework, can talk across languages
- simultaneously analyze data from millions of service timer sources across thousands of distinct timer classes (can see how fast specific pieces of the framework are performing)
Operations
- 10 fulfillment centers, total 4.2 million square feet
- Seasonal expansion
- 27/7/365 operation
David makes this interesting point; building an order fullfilment center is a lot like writing an
operating system. You've got input, output, management of resources, processing queues etc.
Posted by mike at July 29, 2004 3:26 PM
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