How AWS powered Prime Day 2024 for record-breaking sales

The last HAQM Prime Day 2024 (July 17-18) was HAQM’s biggest Prime Day shopping event ever, with record sales and more items sold during the two-day event than any previous Prime Day event. Prime members shopped for millions of deals and saved billions across more than 35 categories globally.

I live in South Korea, but luckily I was staying in Seattle to attend the AWS Heroes Summit during Prime Day 2024. I signed up for a Prime membership and used Rufus, my new AI-powered conversational shopping assistant, to search for items quickly and easily. Prime members in the U.S. like me chose to consolidate their deliveries on millions of orders during Prime Day, saving an estimated 10 million trips. This consolidation results in lower carbon emissions on average.

We know from Jeff’s annual blog post that AWS runs the HAQM website and mobile app that makes these short-term, large scale global events feasible. (check out his 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 posts for a look back). Today I want to share top numbers from AWS that made my amazing shopping experience possible.

Prime Day 2024 – all the numbers
Here are some of the most interesting and/or mind-blowing metrics:

HAQM EC2 – Since many of HAQM.com services such as Rufus and Search use AWS artificial intelligence (AI) chips under the hood, HAQM deployed a cluster of over 80,000 Inferentia and Trainium chips for Prime Day. During Prime Day 2024, HAQM used over 250K AWS Graviton chips to power more than 5,800 distinct HAQM.com services (double that of 2023).

HAQM EBS – In support of Prime Day, HAQM provisioned 264 PiB of HAQM EBS storage in 2024, a 62 percent increase compared to 2023. When compared to the day before Prime Day 2024, HAQM.com performance on HAQM EBS jumped by 5.6 trillion read/write I/O operations during the event, or an increase of 64 percent compared to Prime Day 2023. Also, when compared to the day before Prime Day 2024, HAQM.com transferred an incremental 444 petabytes of data during the event, or an increase of 81 percent compared to Prime Day 2023.

HAQM Aurora – On Prime Day, 6,311 database instances running the PostgreSQL-compatible and MySQL-compatible editions of HAQM Aurora processed more than 376 billion transactions, stored 2,978 terabytes of data, and transferred 913 terabytes of data.

HAQM DynamoDB – DynamoDB powers multiple high-traffic HAQM properties and systems including Alexa, the HAQM.com sites, and all HAQM fulfillment centers. Over the course of Prime Day, these sources made tens of trillions of calls to the DynamoDB API. DynamoDB maintained high availability while delivering single-digit millisecond responses and peaking at 146 million requests per second.

HAQM ElastiCache – ElastiCache served more than quadrillion requests on a single day with a peak of over 1 trillion requests per minute.

HAQM QuickSight – Over the course of Prime Day 2024, one HAQM QuickSight dashboard used by Prime Day teams saw 107K unique hits, 1300+ unique visitors, and delivered over 1.6M queries.

HAQM SageMaker – SageMaker processed more than 145B inference requests during Prime Day.

HAQM Simple Email Service (HAQM SES) – SES sent 30 percent more emails for HAQM.com during Prime Day 2024 vs 2023, delivering 99.23 percent of those emails to customers.

HAQM GuardDuty – During Prime Day 2024, HAQM GuardDuty monitored nearly 6 trillion log events per hour, a 31.9% increase from the previous year’s Prime Day.

AWS CloudTrail – CloudTrail processed over 976 billion events in support of Prime Day 2024.

HAQM CloudFront – CloudFront handled a peak load of over 500 million HTTP requests per minute, for a total of over 1.3 trillion HTTP requests during Prime Day 2024, a 30 percent increase in total requests compared to Prime Day 2023.

AWS Lambda – AWS Lambda handled over 1.3 trillion invocations during Prime Day 2024.

HAQM Elastic Container Service (HAQM ECS) – HAQM ECS launched 77.24M tasks for Prime Day 2024, a 23% increase from the previous year’s Prime Day.

Prepare to Scale
As Jeff noted in every year, rigorous preparation is key to the success of Prime Day and our other large-scale events. For example, 733 AWS Fault Injection Service experiments were run to test resilience and ensure HAQM.com remains highly available on Prime Day.

If you are preparing for a similar business-critical events, product launches, and migrations, I strongly recommend that you take advantage of newly-branded AWS Countdown, a support program designed for your project lifecycle to assess operational readiness, identify and mitigate risks, and plan capacity, using proven playbooks developed by AWS experts. For example, with additional help from AWS Countdown, Legal Zoom successfully migrated 450 servers with minimal issues and continues to leverage AWS Countdown Premium to streamline and expedite the launch of SaaS applications.

We look forward to seeing what other records will be broken next year!

— Channy & Jeff;

Update on October 4, 2024 – We added new metrics of AWS Lambda and HAQM ECS for Prime Day 2024.