Technology

Amazon is one of the first major companies that started an ecommerce website for selling goods online. The e-business based in Washington started initially as a bookstore, but due to its success diversified into other goods.

This website went through a big architectural change and moved from a two tier monolith to a distributed, decentralized services platform that serves many different applications. From this we see that the hardware they maintain at Amazon includes databases at different locations that are serving a set of applications. Originally the e-store started as one application that was linked to a back end written in C. This however changed once the e-store grew its products.

The website is highly service oriented and has divided its databases into small parts that act as service interfaces. The architecture is built around several application servers that provide service to different applications. The webpage itself is one of the application servers and also has other servers like the customer service application and the seller interface.

The application does not use a specific approach and at certain places uses Jboss or java, but they dont use the entire j2EE stack they only use the servlets. For the process requests that they service they use C, but for the building of the content they either use Pearl or Mason.

 Amazon probably has one of the largest Xen installations and it has modified and adapted the Xen version. The exact version that they use is not known but we know that it is based on the LIUNUx platform. They are using the REDHAT LINUX platform. Apart from that for storage purposes they have two separate forms of storage, on local storage and one network based storage. The local storage also called the instance storage is where data is stored till the instance is terminated and the other one is where persistent data is stored.

The configuration at Amazon uses cloud computing and have a distributed architecture. This indicates that they operate in multiple different zones. This kind of architecture poses a problem for Amazon as operating in different locations can lead to problems in integration and also other administrative issues such as power breakdowns. Amazon has faced a major problem of power breakdown due to this architecture that they employ. Due to a certain power breakdown in one of the areas the website is shutdown which obviously leads to losses.

This kind of problem is one that is faced by many of the ecommerce sites that operate in multiple availability zones. This kind of problem can be resolved by having the same applications being run at several application zones. This can be resolved as the application that faces the breakdown will be the only one that is shutdown and the customers would not be affected. The aim here is to provide the customers with smooth operations of the website and to do so when an application is run in multiple zones. If one zone breakdowns the customer request can be serviced by other zones that also operate the same application.

Another solution to this problem can be that the company can adopt a more centralized architecture and operate in one zone instead of at multiple zones. This way the problem of a breakdown in one zone would not affect the website. The centralized database can be used to service all request but that poses the problem of low scalability so they need to create a hybrid solution by having certain application servers at multiple sites as well as a centralized server so that the smooth running of the website is not affected by the problems at any one zone and the customers are provided with a good service.