Hacker News Reader

Comment by optiomal_isgood | Hacker News Reader

Amazon.com was completely broken here (Europe) and they're back, I was observing from where the assets were loaded from and they switched from EU to NA as a failover. Homework well done.

View on HN

I was surprised to learn Amazon don't use their own CDN

They used to use AWS CloudFront and switched to Fastly, someone shared this in another comment:

[https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2020/05/fastly-amazon-hom...: CDN Fastly Wins Content Delivery Business For Amazon.com and IMDB Websites)

Quoting:

> "But with small object delivery, like images loading fast on Amazon’s home page, it’s the opposite. Customers will pay for a better level of performance and in this case, Fastly clearly outperformed Amazon’s own CDN CloudFront. This isn’t too surprising since CloudFront’s strength isn’t web performance, or even live streaming, but rather on-demand delivery of video and downloads."

Amazon (like a lot of others) use several CDNs for redundancy. You can see from dig that it resolves to combinations of cloudfront, akamai, and (presumably, based on your reported experience) fastly.

  dig +short www.amazon.com
  tp.47cf2c8c9-frontier.amazon.com.
  d3ag4hukkh62yn.cloudfront.net.
  65.8.70.16

  dig +short www.amazon.co.uk
  tp.bfbdc3ca1-frontier.amazon.co.uk.
  dmv2chczz9u6u.cloudfront.net.
  13.224.0.89

  dig +short www.amazon.in
  tp.c95e7e602-frontier.amazon.in.
  d1elgm1ww0d6wo.cloudfront.net.
  13.224.9.30

  dig +short www.amazon.co.jp
  tp.4d5ad1d2b-frontier.amazon.co.jp.
  www.amazon.co.jp.edgekey.net.
  e15312.a.akamaiedge.net.
  104.71.134.162

Still getting broken assets from the UK.

You're right, I should've said *partially* back. At least the CSSs now load, but a few products images are still gone. However it was completely broken here before (literally loading just the main HTML).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com