AWS Scales to Billions, Trillions, Quadrillions on Prime Day

Every once in a while, the folks at AWS share metrics that illustrate the sheer scale of AWS cloud databases and other infrastructure. On Prime Day, one of Amazon's busiest times of the year, the usage numbers tell a story of extreme scalability. 

Prime Day is a misnomer. The event actually extended over 66 hours, beginning on June 21, so the following stats represent nearly 3 days of workload. But they're impressive no matter how you slice them. 

Here are the data points shared by AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post. 

• Amazon Fulfillment Technologies used 3,715 instances of a PostgreSQL-compatible version of Amazon's Aurora database to process 233 billion transactions, store 1,595 terabytes of data, and transfer 615 terabytes. (For comparison, Amazon used 1,900 Aurora instances to process 148 billion transactions in 2019.)

• Amazon's DynamoDB handled trillions of API calls, peaking at 89.2 million requests per second. DynamoDB, a NoSQL database, is used by Amazon's website, fulfillment …