66 items tagged “amazon”
2024
[...] here’s what we found when we integrated [Amazon Q, GenAI assistant for software development] into our internal systems and applied it to our needed Java upgrades:
- The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real).
- In under six months, we've been able to upgrade more than 50% of our production Java systems to modernized Java versions at a fraction of the usual time and effort. And, our developers shipped 79% of the auto-generated code reviews without any additional changes.
— Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO
If you’re auditioning for your job every day, and you’re auditioning against every other brilliant employee there, and you know that at the end of the year, 6% of you are going to get cut no matter what, and at the same time, you have access to unrivaled data on partners, sellers, and competitors, you might be tempted to look at that data to get an edge and keep your job and get to your restricted stock units.
The saddest part about it, though, is that the garbage books don’t actually make that much money either. It’s even possible to lose money generating your low-quality ebook to sell on Kindle for $0.99. The way people make money these days is by teaching students the process of making a garbage ebook. It’s grift and garbage all the way down — and the people who ultimately lose out are the readers and writers who love books.
2021
This teaches us that—when it’s a big enough deal—Amazon will lie to us. And coming from the company that runs the production infrastructure for our companies, stores our data, and has been granted an outsized position of trust based upon having earned it over 15 years, this is a nightmare.
2020
The open secret Jennings filled me in on is that OpenStreetMap (OSM) is now at the center of an unholy alliance of the world’s largest and wealthiest technology companies. The most valuable companies in the world are treating OSM as critical infrastructure for some of the most-used software ever written. The four companies in the inner circle— Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft— have a combined market capitalization of over six trillion dollars.
2019
Amazon’s Away Teams laid bare: How AWS’s hivemind of engineers develop and maintain their internal tech (via) Some interesting insights into how Amazon structure their engineering organization to maximize team productivity in a service-oriented environment. Two things that stood out to me: each service is owned by a “home team”, but sometimes features that are needed by other teams can be built by forming an “away team” to build out that functionality. Secondly, Amazon has a concept of “bar raisers” who are engineers across the organization who help approve key design and architectural decisions. It’s possible to go against the recommendation of a bar raiser but “such a move is noted and made visible to higher levels of management”.
One of the standards you have to have demonstrated to being able to reach Principle Engineer inside Amazon is "Respect what has gone before". It's very likely you don't know the why, what or how of it. Often what was written was the best that could be done to the constraints.
2012
What happens at Amazon once I make an order?
Here’s a fascinating article about Amazon’s fulfilment center in Swansea, Wales which gives a glimpse behind the scenes: http://www.walesonline.co.uk/new...
[... 35 words]Does Amazon have a API for websites to utilize order and delivery fulfillment?
The Amazon Fulfillment Web Service used to handle this http://aws.amazon.com/fws/—but their site now says "Effective June 2012, Amazon Services will no longer support Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (Amazon FWS). All functions and services currently supported by Amazon FWS are currently available through Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS)." So I guess you want the Amazon Marketplace Web Service: https://developer.amazonservices...
[... 82 words]2011
The excess capacity story is a myth. It was never a matter of selling excess capacity, actually within 2 months after launch AWS would have already burned through the excess Amazon.com capacity. Amazon Web Services was always considered a business by itself, with the expectation that it could even grow as big as the Amazon.com retail operation.
2010
Amazon S3: Versioning Proposal. The us-west-1 S3 bucket region now optionally supports versioning—once enabled on a bucket, all previous versions of keys will be preserved.
Since we moved to EC2, the number of unique users has gone up 50%, and pageviews are up more than 100%. To support this growth, we have added 30% more ram and 50% more CPU, yet because of Amazon's constant price reductions, we are actually paying less per month now than when we started.
2009
One way to establish that peace-preserving threat of mutual assured destruction is to commit yourself beforehand, which helps explain why so many retailers promise to match any competitor's advertised price. Consumers view these guarantees as conducive to lower prices. But in fact offering a price-matching guarantee should make it less likely that competitors will slash prices, since they know that any cuts they make will immediately be matched. It's the retail version of the doomsday machine.
OpenStreetMap Rendering Database. Amazon have added an OpenStreetMap snapshot as a public data set, thanks to some smart prompting by Jeremy Dunck.
When I worked at Amazon.com we had a deeply-ingrained hatred for all of the SQL databases in our systems. Now, we knew perfectly well how to scale them through partitioning and other means. But making them highly available was another matter. Replication and failover give you basic reliability, but it's very limited and inflexible compared to a real distributed datastore with master-master replication, partition tolerance, consensus and/or eventual consistency, or other availability-oriented features.
Tile Drawer (via) The most inspired use of EC2 I’ve seen yet: center a map on an area, pick a Cascadenik stylesheet URL (or write and link to your own) and Tile Drawer gives you an Amazon EC2 AMI and a short JSON snippet. Launch the AMI with the JSON as the “user data” parameter and you get your own OpenStreetMap tile rendering server, which self-configures on startup and starts rendering and serving tiles using your custom design.
Introducing Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Amazon now let you create a network of private EC2 instances completely isolated from the internet and the rest of the EC2 cloud, then link them back to your home network via a VPN.
This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.
Evidence of OpenID at Amazon. It looks like Amazon are using OpenID for SSO between their different properties—I clicked a link to sign in to AWS and the URL had OpenID query string parameters.
You can buy an iPod nano on Apple, Best Buy, etc. for about $149. Amazon sells it for $134. That’s probably cost price. It turns out that Amazon can sell almost everything at cost price and still make a product because of volume. It’s all down to the Negative Operating Cycle. Amazon turns over its inventory every 20 days whereas Best Buy takes 74 days. Standard retail term payments take 45 days. So Best Buy is in debt between day 45 and day 74. Amazon, on the other hand, are sitting on cash between day 20 and day 45. In that time, they can invest that money. That’s where their profit comes from.
— Jared Spool, via Jeremy Keith
AWS Import/Export: Ship Us That Disk! Andrew Tanenbaum said “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway”, and now you can ship your storage device direct to Amazon and have them load the data in to an S3 bucket for you.
EC2: Creating an Image. Here’s the easier way of creating your own AMI: start with a running instance in EC2, then customise it to fit your purposes and create a new bundle (and then AMI) using the ec2-bundle-vol command.
HOWTO Building a self-bundling Debian AMI. Not as terrifying as you would have thought. Also contains some neat hints as to how some of the more magical parts of EC2 work (like the way your SSH public key automatically ends up in /root/.ssh/authorized_keys).
New Features for EC2: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch. EC2 now fulfils the promise of “magic scaling in the cloud” out of the box—CloudWatch monitors performance of your EC2 instances without needing to install any monitoring software, Auto Scaling allows you to configure “scaling triggers” which start up new instances based on information from CloudWatch, and Elastic Load Balancing balances requests across all available instances.
Amazon Says Listing Problem Was an Error, Not a Hack (via) “A friend within the company told him that someone working on Amazon’s French site mistagged a number of keyword categories, including the ’Gay and Lesbian’ category, as pornographic, using what’s known internally as the Browse Nodes tool. Soon the mistake affected Amazon sites worldwide.”
How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code. Looks legit—the author claims to have sparked this weekend’s #amazonfail moral outrage (where Amazon where accused of removing Gay and Lesbian books from their best seller rankings) by exploiting a CSRF hole in Amazon’s “report as inappropriate” feature to trigger automatic takedowns. EDIT: His claim is disputed elsewhere (see comments)
Experiences deploying a large-scale infrastructure in Amazon EC2. “At OpenX we recently completed a large-scale deployment of one of our server farms to Amazon EC2. Here are some lessons learned from that experience.”
Finding similar items with Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Python, and Hadoop streaming. Tutorial for running Hadoop jobs on Elastic MapReduce using Python and the 2005 Audioscrobbler dataset.
Amazon Elastic MapReduce (via) Hadoop as a service. Basically a web based GUI around Hadoop—you could roll this yourself on EC2 but for a small markup on regular EC2 prices you get to avoid the extra work setting everything up. Data processing scripts can be written in Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, R, or C++ and are loaded in to S3 before firing off the job.
Manage Amazon EC2 With New Web-Based AWS Management Console. Finally! I’m amazed it took Amazon so long to do this. Managing EC2 instances from a custom Firefox extension was pretty bizarre. It’s a very nice interface, built on top of YUI. Unfortunately you still have to manage your entire virtual server farm using a single shared Amazon account.