The first use case completed by the team was video downloading. This included provisioning a brand-new, Tier 1 service and migrating more than a billion download records from Oracle to DynamoDB. The team invested 32 months of engineering effort in the project and delivered a download service that could handle high throughput.

More than 30 other applications regularly use CQS APIs. These applications had to be switched over to the new API endpoints. Finally, the team had to migrate all the ownership records—constituting billions of rows—that it stored in Oracle. APIs that wrote to the system were set to copy data simultaneously to Oracle and DynamoDB. The team was able to validate the data and test API performance while the system was still fully operational. The service exceeded the high scaling targets required to support the Prime Video business.

By applying the capabilities of AWS, the team was freed to innovate in ways that were not possible on the legacy system. Using Amazon DynamoDB Streams and AWS Lambda, the team built mechanisms to analyze discrepancies between the new and legacy systems in near-real time to ensure customers could not be affected when the cutover occurred. This analysis was performed without any impact on latency or availability of the service.

Using Amazon SQS, the team implemented a service to synchronize the ownership state of customers across the systems when migration errors were detected. These tools have positioned the team to move toward an event-driven architecture, which unlocks previously impossible use cases around customer engagement and system performance.

The team achieved an average of 30 percent improvement in latency for key performance indicators critical to the video-playback experience. For example, errors in the Entitlements service were reduced by 90 percent and its latency was improved by 15–50 percent. The latency incurred in retrieving a customer’s TV On Demand library was reduced by 85 percent, from 800 milliseconds to just 120.

The project resulted in a single, globally replicated data set with improved resiliency, scalability, latency, operational efficiency, and a 55 percent reduction in cost compared to the old system. Tim Kohn, vice president of technology for Prime Video, says, “We migrated billions of rows from Oracle to Amazon DynamoDB, and we increased elasticity and reliability with no downtime for our global customer base.”