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Today at the Web 2.0 Summit, Alyssa Henry, VP of Amazon’s AWS Storage Services, gave one example of how Amazon uses its cloud storage and processing power to handle one issue that is little thought about but vital to its overall profitability: combatting warehouse theft.
To determine which items are most likely to be stolen, Amazon stores the product catalog data in S3, which ends up having more than 50 million updates a week. The team spins up Amazon compute clusters every 30 minutes, crunch the data, and the data is fed back to the warehouse and website. At the center of the service is the new Elastic Map Reduce, a new hosted Hadoop framework running on AWS that lets customers spin up the equivalent of a supercomputer for processing big data.
