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new 1e7df836154 [BLOG] Add New Community Blog for Amazon (#13062)
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commit 1e7df8361541e91a75a9d6880c14338dd1652041
Author: Dipankar Mazumdar <103004148+dipankarmazum...@users.noreply.github.com>
AuthorDate: Mon Mar 31 12:35:16 2025 -0400
[BLOG] Add New Community Blog for Amazon (#13062)
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+---
+title: "Powering Amazon Unit Economics at Scale Using Apache Hudi"
+excerpt: "How Amazon's Profit Intelligence team uses Apache Hudi to power
hundreds of pipelines"
+author: Jason, Abhishek, Sethu in collaboration with Dipankar
+category: blog
+image: /assets/images/blog/concurrency_control/amz-1200x600.jpg
+tags:
+- Apache Hudi
+- Amazon
+- Community
+---
+
+:::tip TL;DR
+
+Amazon’s Profit Intelligence team built Nexus, a configuration-driven platform
powered by Apache Hudi, to scale unit economics across thousands of retail use
cases. Nexus manages over 1,200 tables, processes hundreds of billions of rows
daily, and handles ~1 petabyte of data churn each month. This blog dives into
their data lakehouse journey, Nexus architecture, Hudi integration, and key
operational learnings.
+
+:::
+
+
+Understanding and improving unit-level profitability at Amazon's scale is a
massive challenge - one that requires flexibility, precision, and operational
efficiency. In this blog, we walk through how Amazon’s Profit Intelligence team
built a scalable, configuration-driven platform called Nexus, and how Apache
Hudi became the cornerstone of its data lake architecture.
+
+By combining declarative configuration with Hudi's advanced table management
capabilities, the team has enabled thousands of retail business use cases to
run seamlessly, allowing finance and pricing teams to self-serve insights on
cost and profitability, without constantly relying on engineering intervention.
+
+
+## The Business Need: Profit Intelligence and Unit Economics
+
+Within Amazon’s Worldwide Stores, the Selling Partner Services (SPS) team
supports seller-facing operations. A key part of this effort is computing
**Contribution Profit** \- a granular metric that captures revenue, costs, and
profitability at the unit level, such as *a shipped item to the customer*.
+
+Contribution Profit powers decision-making for a range of downstream teams
including:
+
+* Pricing
+* Forecasting
+* Finance
+
+The challenge? Supporting the scale and diversity of retail use cases across
Amazon's global business, while maintaining a data platform that's both
extensible and maintainable.
+
+## Amazon’s Data Lakehouse Journey
+
+Over the past decade, the architecture behind Contribution Profit has gone
through several phases of evolution, driven by the need to better support
Amazon’s growing and diverse retail business use cases.
+
+### Early Phase
+
+<img src="/assets/images/blog/fig1_amz.png" alt="redshift" width="800"
align="middle"/>
+
+Initial implementations relied on ETL pipelines that published data to
Redshift, often with unstructured job flows. Business logic could exist at
various layers of the ETL and was written entirely in SQL, making it difficult
to track, maintain, or modify. These pipelines lacked systematic enforcement of
patterns, which led to fragmentation and technical debt.
+
+### Intermediate Phase
+
+<img src="/assets/images/blog/fig2_amz.png" alt="flink" width="800"
align="middle"/>
+
+To improve scalability and support streaming workloads, the team transitioned
to a setup involving Apache Flink and a custom-built data lake. Although this
introduced broader data processing flexibility, it still had major drawbacks:
+
+* Redshift-based ETLs remained in use.
+* Business logic and schema changes required engineering involvement.
+* There were ongoing scalability and maintainability issues with the custom
data lake.
+* Flink introduced operational challenges of its own, such as handling version
upgrades through AWS Managed Flink and providing done signal in batch operation.
+
+### Current State: Nexus + Apache Hudi
+
+Each of the prior approaches came with tradeoffs, especially around business
logic being tightly coupled with code, making it hard for non-engineers to
simulate or change metrics for a specific retail business.
+
+Recognizing the need for better abstraction and operational maturity, the team
built Nexus \- a configuration-driven platform for defining and orchestrating
data pipelines. All lake interactions including ingestion, transformation,
schema evolution, and table management now go through Nexus. Nexus is powered
by [**Apache Hudi**](https://hudi.apache.org), which provides the foundation
for scalable ingestion, efficient upserts, schema evolution, and transactional
guarantees on Amazon S3.
+
+This new architecture enabled the team to decouple business logic from
engineering code, allowing business teams to define logic declaratively. It
also introduced standardization across workloads, eliminated redundant
pipelines, and laid the groundwork for scaling unit economics calculations
across thousands of use cases.
+
+
+#### Key Modules of Nexus
+
+<img src="/assets/images/blog/fig3_amz.png" alt="nexus" width="800"
align="middle"/>
+
+Nexus consists of four core components:
+
+**Configuration Layer**
+
+The topmost layer where users define their business logic in a declarative
format. These configurations are typically generated and enriched with metadata
by internal systems.
+
+**NexusFlow (Orchestration)**
+
+<img src="/assets/images/blog/fig4_amz.png" alt="orch" width="1000"
align="middle"/>
+<p align="center"><em>Figure: Sample NexusFlow Config</em></p>
+
+Responsible for generating and executing workflows. It operates on two levels:
+
+* Logical Layer: Comprising NexusETL jobs and other tasks.
+* Physical Layer: Implemented via AWS Step Functions to orchestrate EMR jobs
and related dependencies. NexusFlow supports extensibility through a federated
model and can execute diverse task types like Spark jobs, Redshift queries,
wait conditions, and legacy ETLs.
+
+**NexusETL (Execution)**
+
+<img src="/assets/images/blog/fig5_amz.png" alt="etl" width="1000"
align="middle"/>
+<p align="center"><em>Figure: Sample NexusETL Config</em></p>
+
+Executes Spark-based data transformation jobs. Jobs are defined entirely in
configuration, with support for:
+
+* Built-in transforms like joins and filters
+* Custom UDFs
+* Source/Sink/Transform operators: It operates at the job abstraction level
and is typically invoked by NexusFlow during orchestration.
+
+**NexusDataLake (Storage)**
+
+<img src="/assets/images/blog/fig5_amz.png" alt="datalake" width="1000"
align="middle"/>
+<p align="center"><em>Figure: Sample NexusDataLake Config</em></p>
+
+A storage abstraction layer built on Apache Hudi. NexusDataLake manages:
+
+* Table creation
+* Schema inference and evolution
+* Catalog integration: All interactions with Hudi, such as inserts, upserts,
table schema changes, and metadata syncs are funneled through NexusETL and
NexusFlow, maintaining consistency across the platform.
+
+By standardizing how data is defined, processed, and stored, Nexus has enabled
a scalable, maintainable, and extensible architecture. Every data lake
interaction \- from ingestion to table maintenance, is performed through this
configuration-first model, which now powers hundreds of use cases across Amazon
retail.
+
+## Why Apache Hudi?
+
+Apache Hudi has been central to Nexus’ success, providing the core data lake
storage layer for scalable ingestion, updates, and metadata management. It
enables fast, incremental updates at massive scale while maintaining
transactional guarantees on top of Amazon S3.
+
+In Amazon’s current architecture:
+
+* Copy-on-Write (COW) table type is used for all Hudi tables.
+* Workloads generate hundreds of billions of row updates daily, with write
patterns spanning concentrated single-partition updates and wide-range
backfills across up to 90 partitions.
+* All Hudi interactions, including inserts, schema changes, and metadata
syncs, are managed through Nexus.
+
+**Key Capabilities used with Apache Hudi**
+* **Efficient Upserts**
+ Hudi’s design primitives such as
[indexes](https://hudi.apache.org/docs/indexes) for Copy-on-Write (CoW) tables
enable high-throughput update patterns by avoiding the need to join against the
entire dataset to determine which files to rewrite, which is particularly
critical for our daily workloads.
+
+* **Incremental Processing**
+ By using Hudi’s native [incremental
pull](https://www.onehouse.ai/blog/getting-started-incrementally-process-data-with-apache-hudi)
capabilities, downstream systems are able to consume only the changes between
commits. This is essential for efficiently updating Contribution Profit metrics
that power business decision-making.
+
+* **Metadata Table**
+ Enabling the [metadata table](https://hudi.apache.org/docs/metadata)
(`hoodie.metadata.enable=true`) significantly reduced job runtimes by avoiding
expensive file listings on S3. This is an important optimization given the
scale at which we process updates across more than 1200 Hudi tables.
+
+* **Schema Evolution**
+ Table creation and evolution are fully managed through configuration in
Nexus. Hudi’s built-in support for [schema
evolution](https://hudi.apache.org/docs/schema_evolution) has allowed the team
to onboard new use cases and adapt to changing schemas without requiring
expensive rewrites or manual interventions.
+
+## Key Learnings from Operating Hudi at Amazon Scale
+
+Operating Apache Hudi at the scale and velocity required by Amazon’s Profit
Intelligence workloads surfaced a set of hard-earned lessons, especially around
concurrency, metadata handling, and cost optimization. These learnings reflect
both architectural refinements and operational trade-offs that others adopting
Hudi at large scale may find useful.
+
+### 1\. Concurrency Control
+
+At Amazon’s ingestion scale \- hundreds of billions of rows per day and
thousands of concurrent table updates, multi-writer concurrency is a reality,
not an edge case.
+
+The team initially used Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC), which works well
in environments with low write conflicts. OCC assumes that concurrent writers
rarely overlap, and when they do, the job retries after detecting a conflict.
However, in high-contention scenarios, like multiple jobs writing to the same
partition within a short time window, this led to frequent retries and job
failures.
+
+To resolve this, the team pivoted to a new table structure designed to
minimize concurrent insertions. This change helped reduce contention by
lowering the likelihood of multiple writers operating on overlapping partitions
simultaneously. The updated design enabled using OCC while avoiding the
excessive retries and failures we had initially encountered.
+
+### 2\. Metadata Table Management: Async vs Sync Trade-Offs
+
+Apache Hudi’s metadata table dramatically improves performance by avoiding
expensive file listings on cloud object stores like S3. It maintains a
persistent *index* *of files*, enabling faster operations such as file pruning,
and data skipping.
+
+The team enabled Hudi’s metadata table early (`hoodie.metadata.enable=true`)
and started off with synchronous cleaning but switched to asynchronous cleaning
to reduce job runtime. However, we ran into an issue when experimenting with
asynchronous cleaning. Due to a [known issue
(\#11535)](https://github.com/apache/hudi/issues/11535), async cleaning wasn’t
properly cleaning up metadata entries.
+
+To ensure the metadata tables were properly cleaned, we switched all of our
Hudi workloads back to synchronous cleaning.
+
+### 3\. Cost Management
+
+While Apache Hudi helped Amazon reduce data duplication and improve ingestion
efficiency, we quickly realized that operational costs were not driven by
storage \- but by the API interaction patterns with S3.
+
+Breakdown of the cost profile:
+
+* **70% of total cost** came from `PUT` requests (writes)
+* Combined `PUT + GET` operations accounted for **80%** of the bill
+* Storage cost remained a small fraction, even with 3+ PB of total data under
management
+
+Their data ingestion patterns contributed to this:
+
+* Daily workloads: Heavy concentration (99%) of updates into a single
partition
+* Backfill workloads: Spread evenly across 30–90 partitions
+
+To manage this:
+
+* We moved to **S3 Intelligent-Tiering** to reduce unused data storage costs
+* Enabled **EMR cluster auto-scaling** to dynamically adjust compute resources
+* Batched writes and carefully tuned Hudi configurations (e.g.,
`write.batch.size`, `compaction.small.file.limit`) to reduce unnecessary file
churn
+
+## Operational Scale: Nexus by the Numbers
+
+| Metric | Value |
+| :---- | :---- |
+| Tables Managed | 1200+ (5–15 updates/day per table) |
+| Legacy SQL Deprecated | 300,000+ lines |
+| Total Data Managed | \~3 Petabytes |
+| Monthly Data Changes | \~1 Petabyte added/deleted |
+| Daily Record Updates | Hundreds of billions |
+| Developer Time Saved | 300+ days |
+
+Nexus with Apache Hudi as the foundation has significantly improved the scale,
modularity, and maintainability of the data lake operations at Amazon. As the
business use cases scale, the team is also focused on managing the increasing
complexity of the data lake, while ensuring that both technical and
non-technical stakeholders can interact with Nexus effectively.
+
+This blog is based on Amazon’s presentation at the Hudi Community Sync. If you
are interested in watching the recorded version of the video, you can find it
[here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMXhlb7Uci8).
+
+---
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