Prime Day 2023 Powered by AWS – All the Numbers

As part of my annual tradition to tell you about how AWS makes Prime Day possible, I am happy to be able to share some chart-topping metrics (check out my 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 posts for a look back).

This year I bought all kinds of stuff for my hobbies including a small drill press, filament for my 3D printer, and irrigation tools. I also bought some very nice Alphablock books for my grandkids. According to our official release, the first day of Prime Day was the single largest sales day ever on HAQM and for independent sellers, with more than 375 million items purchased.

Prime Day by the Numbers
As always, Prime Day was powered by AWS. Here are some of the most interesting and/or mind-blowing metrics:

HAQM Elastic Block Store (HAQM EBS) – The HAQM Prime Day event resulted in an incremental 163 petabytes of EBS storage capacity allocated – generating a peak of 15.35 trillion requests and 764 petabytes of data transfer per day. Compared to the previous year, HAQM increased the peak usage on EBS by only 7% Year-over-Year yet delivered +35% more traffic per day due to efficiency efforts including workload optimization using HAQM Elastic Compute Cloud (HAQM EC2) AWS Graviton-based instances. Here’s a visual comparison:

AWS CloudTrail – AWS CloudTrail processed over 830 billion events in support of Prime Day 2023.

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 trillions of calls to the DynamoDB API. DynamoDB maintained high availability while delivering single-digit millisecond responses and peaking at 126 million requests per second.

HAQM Aurora – On Prime Day, 5,835 database instances running the PostgreSQL-compatible and MySQL-compatible editions of HAQM Aurora processed 318 billion transactions, stored 2,140 terabytes of data, and transferred 836 terabytes of data.

HAQM Simple Email Service (SES) – HAQM SES sent 56% more emails for HAQM.com during Prime Day 2023 vs. 2022, delivering 99.8% of those emails to customers.

HAQM CloudFront – HAQM CloudFront handled a peak load of over 500 million HTTP requests per minute, for a total of over 1 trillion HTTP requests during Prime Day.

HAQM SQS – During Prime Day, HAQM SQS set a new traffic record by processing 86 million messages per second at peak. This is 22% increase from Prime Day of 2022, where SQS supported 70.5M messages/sec.

HAQM Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – During Prime Day 2023, HAQM used tens of millions of normalized AWS Graviton-based HAQM EC2 instances, 2.7x more than in 2022, to power over 2,600 services. By using more Graviton-based instances, HAQM was able to get the compute capacity needed while using up to 60% less energy.

HAQM Pinpoint – HAQM Pinpoint sent tens of millions of SMS messages to customers during Prime Day 2023 with a delivery success rate of 98.3%.

HAQM GuardDuty – HAQM GuardDuty log volume over the two days of Prime Day 2023 was the highest in the history of the service. In those two days, GuardDuty monitored 29% more log data than the service processes on a typical day.

Prepare to Scale
Every year I reiterate the same message: rigorous preparation is key to the success of Prime Day and our other large-scale events. If you are preparing for a similar chart-topping event of your own, I strongly recommend that you take advantage of AWS Infrastructure Event Management (IEM). As part of an IEM engagement, my colleagues will provide you with architectural and operational guidance that will help you to execute your event with confidence!

— Jeff;