[System Design Tech Case Study Pulse #77] 66,000+ Transactions Per Minute: Magic Behind Amazon's Checkout System and How It Actually Works
Behind the tech with detailed explanation and flow chart....
Hi All,
Amazon's sophisticated checkout system represents one of the most impressive feats of e-commerce engineering, processing over 66,000 transactions per minute during peak events like Black Friday and Prime Day. This incredible infrastructure enables Amazon to provide seamless checkout experiences for hundreds of millions of customers worldwide, even when transaction volumes spike to 5-7x normal levels.
Let's dive deep into how Amazon engineered this system, exploring the key architectural decisions, scaling strategies, and optimizations that enable their checkout pipeline to handle this massive volume of transactions with sub-second response times and 99.999% availability.
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System Overview
Before diving into Amazon's checkout architecture, let's examine key metrics that highlight the scale of its operations:
Transactions processed per minute during peak events: 66,000+
Active customers: 300+ million worldwide
Peak transaction volume: Black Friday/Cyber Monday (5-7x normal traffic)
Data processed per transaction: Multiple kilobytes across dozens of services
Checkout latency: Under 2 seconds for 99% of transactions
Availability: 99.999%+ (less than 6 minutes downtime annually)
Global deployment: Multi-region infrastructure with failover capabilities
Payment methods supported: 100+ global payment options
Fraud detection: Real-time analysis with sub-second response times
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How It works (Behind the Tech ) —
1.User Interaction:
A customer clicks "Place your order" on the checkout page
The request is sent to Amazon's edge servers via their CDN