Amazon.Com

Business-IT Alignment Analysis

It's important to realize that first and foremost Amazon.com is a technology company. Over the past years, Amazon.com grew from an online retailer into a platform on which more than 1 million active retail partners worldwide do business. Behind Amazon.com's successful evolution from retailer to technology platform is its SOA (service-oriented architecture), which broke new technological ground and proved that SOAs can deliver on their promises.

Growth is core to Amazon.com's business strategy, and that has had a significant impact on the way they use technology: growth through more categories, a larger selection, more services, more buying customers, more sellers, more merchants, and more developers, increasing the different access methods, and expanding delivery mechanisms. The impact has been on many areas: larger data sets, faster update rates, more requests, more services, tighter SLAs (service-level agreements), more failures, more latency challenges, more service interdependencies, more developers, more documentation, more programs, more servers, more networks, more data centers. A large part of Amazon.com's technology evolution has been driven to enable this continuing growth, to be ultra-scalable while maintaining availability and performance.

The biggest success has been that Amazon.com has become a platform that other businesses can benefit from. Making Amazon.com a general platform for e-commerce operation has been made possible through their advanced technology investments and it has become a major success. Making Amazon.com available through a Web services interface to any developer in the world free of charge has also been a major success because it has driven so much innovation that they couldn't have thought of themselves.

One of the biggest challenges is developing at large scale, i.e. making sure that developers are productive in this large distributed SOA, making sure that all the pieces work together as intended, now and in the future, testing in an environment like Amazon.com. These are very hard questions, and Amazon.com has no simple answers. Testing in a very large-scale distributed setting is a major challenge.

Current Systems Analysis

Amazon.com has selected HP to provide the highly available Web infrastructure required to power one of the world's busiest e-commerce sites. HP servers help Amazon.com build the most reliable and secure shopping experience online. The servers deliver high availability, scalability and mainframe-class performance needed to support its e-commerce business. HP's Internet computing platforms are designed guarantee the availability and performance of the entire hardware and software environment from end-to-end and across all points of the transaction stream.

Strict service orientation is an excellent technique to achieve isolation; you can come to a level of ownership and control that was not seen before. By prohibiting direct database access by clients, Amazon.com can make scaling and reliability improvements to their service state without involving clients. Each service has a team associated with it, and that team is completely responsible for the service- from scoping out the functionality, to architecting it, to building it, and operating it.

Many services are directly customer-facing in Amazon.com retail applications. Take a simple service such as sales rank; there is an attribute on most product pages that indicates what the sales popularity of that product is in its category. The Listmania service produces specialized that that on almost every page is adapted to the specific product on that page and the history of the customer. This is a case where there is an important direct interaction between the developers of the service and the retail customer.

Amazon.com is a very advanced e-commerce platform on which anyone can become a retail partner and instantly benefit from all the platform functionality that has made Amazon.com so successful. The Amazon.com technology and data is available through the AWS (Amazon Web Services) e-commerce services. This is a free Web-services interface for developers, which they can use to build (and charge for) their own applications on top of Amazon.com. There are about 150,000 of these developers and Amazon.com considers them important customers.

1-Click ordering is the fastest, easiest way to place most orders at Amazon.com. 1-Click ordering is turned on immediately after customer place your first order, provided you've paid for that order with a credit card or directly from your bank account.

Information Security Analysis

There are almost as many definitions of privacy and information security as there are users