Building Amazon Apollo: Engine Behind AWS Deployments

In today's episode, I am joined by Rajul Bhatnagar. Rajul is an Engineering Lead at Amazon in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team.

Rajul and his team at AWS work on Apollo, Amazon’s Deployment Engine. Apollo helps teams at Amazon and externally to automatically deploy code to AWS. From Netflix to Facebook to Amazon.com, everybody relies on Apollo’s efficient and reliable DevOps environment.
Rajul and I discussed how Amazon plans for scalability, and upgrades while ensuring the internet continues to run.

I'm excited for you to hear our discussion, and I welcome your feedback in the comments section.

Here's what we covered:
[0:00] Preview
[2:20] Introduction
[3:13] What is Apollo: Amazon’s Deployment Engine?
[5:11] What is a microservice?
[7:00] Team composition at AWS
[9:00] How does technical scalability work on AWS?
[12:05] Re-architecting systems on Apollo
[15:05] How Amazon plans and estimates technical scalability projects
[18:20] How Amazon prepared for eCommerce surge during the pandemic
[19:30] Migrating to NoSQL DB - Reasons and Process
[24:40] Scaling hardware along with software
[28:05] Alternate technical choices for migrating DB on AWS
[29:05] Eureka moments from working on AWS team
[30:40] Advice for builders when thinking about scalability
[31:57] Recap and Key Insights

Connect with us:
Shreyas Deshmukh:   / deshmukhshreyas  
Rajul Bhatnagar:   / rajulbhatnagar