In January of 2008 we announced that the Amazon Web Services now consume more bandwidth than do the entire global network of Amazon.com retail sites.
Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos has been showing a chart of the relative bandwidth usage and I just received permission to post it here:
Pretty cool, huh?
-- Jeff;


I agree. Pretty cool. I'm glad to see it posted here. It kinda helps validate my excitement.
Posted by: Michael | May 16, 2008 at 09:51 PM
Thank you for posting the graph as it is very interesting. Would you be willing to share the graph showing CPU usage between the two users - Amazon's internal websites and the AWS? As I understand it, one of the attractive features to offering AWS was that it would let Amazon make use of its idle CPU resources.
Posted by: JS | May 16, 2008 at 10:42 PM
Wow! The AWS curve is seriously steep. But even Amazon.com has spiked up quite a bit during 2007/2008. Is there any particular reason for that?
Posted by: Jack | May 17, 2008 at 06:44 AM
what about the scale on the y-axis
Posted by: Paddy | May 17, 2008 at 10:12 AM
Very cool and yet not all that surprising. I know my sites are using a ton of bandwidth, and they're fairly small. I can only imagine the numbers behind those lines.
Posted by: Scott Johnson | May 18, 2008 at 12:51 AM
The interactions between AWS and amazon.com are fundamentally different. What does comparing the bandwidth tell me?
These two metrics have no relation to one another and when compared don't signify anthing. Its pretty straightforward to outsource bandwidth to Akamai and/or other CDN, and almost everyone does. One of these is actively managed to be low, while the other is naturally large.
Posted by: Chris Marino | May 18, 2008 at 11:16 AM
Some quick thoughts: Amazon is obviously not transforming the bandwidth growth (for its retail web sites) into profit. Or has it? I find it hard to believe that profit increased ten-fold in the last 4 years just like bandwidth usage did. Probably caused by an increase in interactivity for product pages and new features like image previews, media download, streaming and so on...
Posted by: Ricardo Niederberger Cabral | May 18, 2008 at 11:39 AM
I appreciate you sharing this... even if you can't label the y axis. :)
VERY interesting.
Posted by: JD Long | May 19, 2008 at 10:22 AM
We're half way into 2008. Where's the rest of the graph?
Posted by: Alan | May 20, 2008 at 07:18 AM
That is the exact chart I mentioned to you the other week. Nice to see it get some distribution.
Posted by: Peter Harkins | May 21, 2008 at 07:09 PM
Your graph presentation is great. It is awesome, i learned few things from your post. Thanks for sharing your post.
Posted by: Greet Verellen | February 14, 2011 at 11:37 PM