Amazon is an American e-commerce company that is based in Seattle. It also provides cloud computing services. It was first founded in 1994 on 5th of July by Jeff Bezos. Today, Amazon is a tech giant that is the biggest internet-based retailer present in the world. In terms of revenue, it is second largest as compared to Alibaba group.
This service initially began as a bookstore which later became very diverse in terms of the things that can be bought on this website. Today, it offers electronics, food, jewelry, toys, apparel, downloads, streaming, and almost every legal good that you can think of.
The service also provides an in-house brand that is known as AmazonBasics. This service sells lower-end goods.
Although Amazon is a very big company, it does not necessarily mean that it is not susceptible to a downtime. In fact, back at the start of July 2018, according to various surveys, this Amazon downtime resulted in a loss of about $100 million.
The exact figure that the company lost is $99166667 around a very prime time, in which sales worth of $1574074 were going through per minute.
According to a report by IDC, downtime disasters in big companies result in a loss of about $2.5 billion every single year.
According to a director at Hyve Managed hosting, Jon Lucas, Amazon is a big giant in the world of e-commerce which uses the AWS infrastructure. So if they could face such a lengthy downtime, then literally any other business can too. Hence, it is important for other retailers to stay alert. Making preparations for an emergency downtime in contract with companies such as CloudEndure could save companies a potential loss of millions.
As a precaution, companies may avoid such downtimes by employing a hosting infrastructure that carries room for loads that are totally unexpected. This should be done without autoscaling since this feature usually takes a while to become active. Within that time period, online retailers may suffer from big losses amounting up to millions especially on a prime day.
As far as the problem with Amazon downtime goes, it first seemed as if there is a faulty code submitted by someone that has resulted in a lot of instability among the systems. Many people first guessed that it had to do with the content distribution and the core application network. However, Amazon was not sure of what caused the problem which resulted in a huge recovery time. Which suggests that their configuration management is not very reliable. It could also be possible that a downstream tangle was caused due to the offending problem which went out of control.
This Amazon downtime is a prime example of why it is important for companies to have a good connection between testing and production. Focusing on production alone could potentially cause a big loss in the case of an emergency downtime. No company would want to face such a tragedy. As an added precaution, getting service from cloud companies for quick disaster recovery is also worthwhile.
