Do large organizations use Amazon web services?

Question

I was impressed with Amazon's new Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS). Amazon has lots of other really impressive web app building blocks. Are there examples of large organizations using AWS? They seem impressive but the downside is you outsource your processing to a third party which could be considered pretty risky.

Answer 1

I'm not sure of any specific large organizations by name, but you could take a look through their case studies page and see what types of organizations use it.

Also, there was an article from 2008 which says:

So who are using these services? A high-ranking Amazon executive told me there are 60,000 different customers across the various Amazon Web Services, and most of them are not the startups that are normally associated with on-demand computing. Rather the biggest customers in both number and amount of computing resources consumed are divisions of banks, pharmaceuticals companies and other large corporations who try AWS once for a temporary project, and then get hooked.

Full article

Again no specific names, but indication that large organizations are using it

Answer 2

I have a buddy who is a dev manager at Amazon. He said that they have an internal mandate to begin using EC2 for many of their customer facing sites, and that amazon.com may be moving to it as well. I believe Bezos calls this "Drinking your own champagne" or something to that effect.

I'm not sure about their internal use of the AWS APIs (e.g. SimpleDB, SQS, SNS).

My experience with SimpleDB and SQS has been very positive. It's not right for all situations. Reliability and performance have been very good, but latency is higher than running your own infrastructure (as you would expect).

Answer 3

There are definitely some large customers. However most are kept private for various reasons. I think they'll have more use cases and references available in the near future though. I've talked to a few people at Amazon and that seems to be something they're pushing forward with.