Amazon

E-commerce & Cloud Platform

300M+

Active Users

200+

Countries

350M+

Products

$469B

Annual Revenue

Company Overview

Amazon started as an online bookstore in 1994 and evolved into the world's largest e-commerce platform and cloud computing provider. Today, Amazon serves over 300 million customers worldwide.

The company's technical evolution from a simple e-commerce site to a global platform with AWS demonstrates how infrastructure can become a product and competitive advantage.

Business Model

E-commerce marketplace with third-party sellers
AWS cloud computing services
Prime membership and subscription services
Logistics and fulfillment services

Context

• Global e-commerce and cloud platform serving millions
• Multi-region architecture with global fulfillment
• AWS cloud services powering global infrastructure

Patterns & Typical Choices

• API Gateway: rate-limits, auth, request shaping (e.g., Zuul/Envoy)

• Storage: metadata (KV/Doc), sessions (in-memory), search (inverted index), analytics (data lake)

• Messaging: queues vs streams; idempotency; outbox/CDC to avoid dual-writes

• Caching: edge CDN + service caches; stampede protection (locks, jittered TTLs)

• Observability: trace IDs across hops; RED/USE metrics with SLOs

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