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Comment by icedistilled | Hacker News Reader

Well they can't blame AWS. AWS status pages shows no issues. (Although it never does even when there are)

AWS and Amazon run on completely separate systems/hardware.

Amazon's internal, last i read, was years behind AWS's infrastructure and they're generally jealous of not having the same tools available.

I tried finding the article, but maybe someone else can help me remember?

There was apparently always some kind of mix (AWS did start from internal requirements, though it quickly diverged). The OG services like S3 and DynamoDB power a lot of Amazon for sure. There’s been more bed of Amazon moving to AWS, most recently talk about shifting their main DBs.

That hasn't been 100% true for like four years. Most new things in Retail are built on AWS.

Are you certain? As of last year, Amazon was switching to Fastly for their retain images:

https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2020/05/fastly-amazon-hom...

Some retail is definitely on AWS. Source: I work at AWS.

A few years back Amazon did a party for moving their warehouses off Oracle databases and into AWS Aurora, so that's not entirely true

This is incorrect.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/prime-day-2021-two-chart-to...

I actually tried shopping on Amazon.com from AWS just to see if it was something local to me. Nope! I couldn't see any products or add them to my cart from AWS.

Can you normally do this?

Yes. I can ssh into an AWS instance and run Firefox with a remote X display. whatismyipaddress.com shows that I'm in the AWS datacenter.

I can also run a WireGuard VPN with AWS as the endpoint. The second way works better on slow connections.

Amazon uses Fastly instead of AWS at a lot of their product pages:

https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2020/05/fastly-amazon-hom...

That’s just CDN, not the real service.

Well, AWS does have a strong CDN offering called Cloudfront so it is surprising.

My understanding is that Fastly has a lot more edge locations than AWS, so using their image CDN results in lower latencies for many users than they could achieve with Cloudfront alone.

It's not edge location count that matters, but Cloudfront doesn't use BGP Anycast but rather does a more traditional DNS-based routing and tries to spread the requests across multiple edge locations (even those farther away) for redundancy, intentionally.

When I asked for detail about why they don't use Anycast, the Cloudfront engineering team basically said their customers care more about uptime than latency and that full Anycast was too sketchy. Apparently amazon.com disagrees, at least. I'm also happy getting much lower first page view latency out of Cloudflare.

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