Amazon is a huge company, whose business includes areas as diverse as eCommerce/marketplace, advertising, logistics, hardware, video and music streaming, and . But those business areas include one that, being less known to the general public, is extremely relevant to the company, and to thousands of other companies around the world. You know ?
The immense power of Amazon Web Services in today’s digital marketplace
Amazon Web Services (AWS), launched in 2006, is a provider of cloud services, offering everything from infrastructure technologies such as compute, storage, and database management to emerging technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. This makes it faster, easier, and more cost-effective to bring existing applications to the cloud, and allows you to build almost anything you can imagine.
AWS provides hosting and cloud computing services to more than a million companies in the world, including some of the largest and many of the most visited websites in the world depend on it to function properly, such as Amazon, Disney+, Tinder, Netflix, etc. Therefore, a failure of its servers can cause serious inconveniences to the global digital business landscape, destabilizing not only the internal management of Amazon, but also the functions of hundreds of tools and websites, which can also affect the stability of the digital ecosystem. . Currently Amazon Web Services controls about a third of the global cloud marketa far cry from its next closest competitor, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud.
This huge volume of customers meant some net income of $386.1 million for Amazon during fiscal year 2020, about €342.5 million. A figure that also positions it as one of the most profitable products for the company generating more than half of its profits.
The problem of global dependency on AWS
As we said, this popularity of AWS around the world means that any kind of unforeseen event is substantially dangerous for the correct development of the functions of numerous websites around the world. Something that could be verified last week, with the 6-hour outage of AWS services.
This December 11, the Amazon cloud service provider suffered an interruption that paralyzed some of the company’s efforts in different parts of the United States. It lasted approximately 6 hours, and equally affected a series of websites, applications and digital tools associated with this platform. Among those affected we have smart products such as roombas, attendees of home, systems of security, etc. According to the company’s statements, this situation was caused by an error in an automated process.
“An automated activity to scale the capacity of one of the AWS services hosted on the AWS Core Network triggered unexpected behavior from a large number of clients within the internal network. This resulted in a large surge of connection activity that overloaded network devices between the internal network and the AWS main network, leading to delays in communication between these networks.”
According to the report drawn up by the company, this fall even affected the ability of the Amazon team to locate what the system failure was at the time. This is due to the fact that first-hand monitoring tools and internal controls were also suffering the ravages of the fall.
As a result of this, the company has stated that it plans to launch a new version of its Service Health Dashboard, its page in which it reports the status of the service, with the intention of facilitating the tracking of future problems. In addition to offering customers a means to receive more timely updates on the status of the service.
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