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Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

This was not true at all, at least thru 2007. At that time, there were some minor services that made some use of AWS services, mostly newer things that had been created after AWS was created.

AWS was not available to developers within Amazon to use at any time before the day it was publicly launched. At least not on a broad basis, and none of the main Amazon.com services ran on it in 2007.

They did share some data centers, however. And I guess data centers are "infrastructure".

I was in a position to know this because I had my hands deep in the retail site as part of my job.

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Interesting... any current Amazon employee that can confirm/deny this? Perhaps things have changed since 2007.

When I left in early 2007 they were working on the transition. More recently I heard that they were substantially if not totally on the AWS infrastructure. So if Werner said it recently it probably is true.

I'm sure sometime in 2007 or 2008 a directive went down that people had to build new stuff on AWS. EC2 is a reasonably good fit for much of the Amazon.com code, as it's just generic hardware. I'm sure in the past 4 years more and more stuff has been written to use S3 as a data store. The core stuff, Gurupa, etc, would have to be re-architected to work with things like SQS and other services.

I'm not saying that nobody in Amazon wanted to use AWS, just that we didn't know about it until the press release, and so there wasn't any opportunity to use it... and of course, all the code from the 1990s was built in a different way so it would have been nontrivial to migrate it.

Amazon Silk uses the EC2 infrastructure -- they explicitly state this in their video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u7F_56WhHk )

We migrated the US retail rendering fleet to AWS last year. simonw posted a link about it elsewhere on this thread.

So, about 4 years after it was publicly claimed to be running on AWS.

yes but we all figured this out earlier because EC2 and S3 downtime would never correspond with Amazon.com downtime - which made it obvious that the 'use the infrastructure we use' line was complete bullshit.

Not necessarily. Netflix managed to survive EC2 and S3 downtimes by architecting around the (mostly known) pitfalls - multiple regions, S3 isn't HA, etc.

This presentation contains some fairly detailed information about the amazon.com migration to AWS.

tl;dr The organic migration to AWS started in 2006 and continues to this day.

http://psav.mediasite.com/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=7ab95f6a5d4...

I was with Amazon in the past. I am no authority but I would come to a similar conclusion. Till end of 07, Amazon.com barely used AWS

Some of the vendor facing systems I worked on definitely were not on AWS by the time I left in 2008. And there wasn't any plan on the map to migrate them at the time. But that was 3 years ago.

At AWS Summit back in June they said that all (US only?) pages are now rendered via servers on AWS. The databases are still big-iron type boxes due to them being on, IIRC, Oracle and I/O being what it is on EC2.

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