Prime Day 2026 put more load on most of Amazon's cloud services than any previous edition, with most of them growing between 20% and 59% on 2025. According to figures Amazon Web Services published on October 6, 2026, DynamoDB peaked at 192 million requests per second during the June 23-26 event, up 27% on the year before, while ElastiCache requests rose 53% to 2.3 quadrillion a day and GuardDuty's monitored log volume rose 59%. Several of those growth rates were faster than in 2025.

In Short

Amazon's cloud business publishes every year how much work its computers did during Prime Day, and in 2026 almost every number grew by a fifth to more than half compared with 2025. Both events lasted four days, so the growth reflects heavier use during the sale rather than a longer sale. For brands and advertisers, the same systems carry the searches, ad clicks, checkouts and order messages that make up Prime Day, so the figures show how much more of that activity Amazon handled.

Growth across the board

The post, by AWS lead blogger Channy Yun, describes an event that "was exclusively for Prime members and ran June 23-26, 2026 with millions of deals across more than 35 categories." It lists 15 services. Thirteen of them can be compared with the 2025 edition, published August 26, 2025, which covered the four-day Prime Day 2025 on July 8-11. Because both events ran for four days, the comparison is closer to like-for-like than any earlier pair of years.

Where AWS gave a growth rate, it is quoted as AWS's figure. The other rates are PPC Land's own calculations from the numbers in the two posts, rounded to the nearest point:

Service 2025 2026 Change
GuardDuty, log events monitored per hour 8.9 trillion 14.08 trillion +59% (AWS)
ElastiCache, daily requests at peak 1.5 quadrillion 2.3 quadrillion +53% (PPC Land)
ElastiCache, requests in a minute at peak 1.4 trillion 2.1 trillion +50% (PPC Land)
ECS tasks on Fargate, average per day 107.1 million 158.3 million +47.7% (AWS)
CloudTrail events 2.5 trillion 3.6 trillion +44% (AWS)
Lambda invocations per day 1.7 trillion 2.3 trillion +35% (PPC Land)
Aurora data stored 4,071 TB 5,491 TB +35% (PPC Land)
SQS peak messages per second 166 million 213 million +28% (PPC Land)
DynamoDB peak requests per second 151 million 192 million +27% (PPC Land)
Kinesis Data Streams peak records per second 807 million 988 million +22% (PPC Land)
EBS peak I/O operations 20.3 trillion 24.8 trillion +22% (PPC Land)
Aurora data transferred 999 TB 1,194 TB +20% (PPC Land)
CloudFront HTTP requests, global week over 3 trillion over 2.1 trillion +5% (AWS)

The middle of the range sits around 30%. Security and monitoring grew fastest, caching and serverless compute came next, and the core databases and streaming services grew by between a fifth and a third. CloudFront, the content delivery service, is the outlier at 5%.

Databases: the steadiest climb

DynamoDB is the one metric AWS has reported in almost every edition since 2017, and it gives the clearest picture of growth. According to the 2026 post, DynamoDB "processed over 59 trillion requests" between June 23 and June 26, and peaked at 192 million requests per second while "delivering single-digit millisecond responses." The database serves Alexa, the Amazon.com sites and all Amazon fulfillment centers.

The 27% rise in the peak is a sharp acceleration. In 2025, by PPC Land's calculation, the DynamoDB peak grew only about 3%, from 146 million to 151 million requests per second, even though the event doubled from two days to four. The 2026 growth rate is the highest since 2020.

Aurora, Amazon's relational database, grew in storage faster than in traffic. Data stored rose about 35% to 5,491 terabytes, close to the 37% growth in 2025 and the 39% in 2024, by PPC Land's calculation. Data transferred rose about 20% to 1,194 terabytes, more than double the roughly 9% growth recorded in each of 2024 and 2025. AWS did not give a 2026 transaction count, saying only that Aurora "processed hundreds of billions of transactions," after reporting 500 billion in 2025.

ElastiCache, the in-memory cache that sits in front of databases to answer repeated requests quickly, posted the largest traffic growth of any data service. Daily requests at peak rose from 1.5 quadrillion to 2.3 quadrillion, about 53%, and requests in a minute from 1.4 trillion to 2.1 trillion, about 50%. In 2024, AWS put ElastiCache at more than a quadrillion requests on a single day and a peak of over 1 trillion a minute, so the per-minute peak has roughly doubled in two years.

Compute: Graviton's share and serverless growth

According to AWS, Graviton - Amazon's own Arm-based processor - "powered up to 49% of the Amazon EC2 compute used by Amazon.com" during Prime Day 2026. In 2025 the figure was "more than 40 percent." Graviton's role has grown every year it has been reported. In 2021 it supported 12 core retail services, the first peak event supported at scale by Graviton2. In 2023 Amazon used 2.7 times more Graviton-based instances than in 2022, across more than 2,600 services, and in 2024 over 250,000 Graviton chips ran more than 5,800 services.

Serverless compute grew faster than the databases. AWS Lambda handled over 2.3 trillion invocations a day, up about 35% from 1.7 trillion. Amazon ECS launched an average of 158.3 million tasks a day on AWS Fargate, a 47.7% increase according to AWS. Both services run code without Amazon's teams managing the underlying servers, so their growth points to more of Amazon's Prime Day workload moving to that model.

Amazon EBS, the block storage attached to EC2 servers, peaked at over 24.8 trillion I/O operations, up about 22%, and moved "over an exabyte of data daily," against "up to an exabyte" in 2025.

Messaging and streaming

Messaging and streaming services grew at a similar pace to the databases. Amazon SQS, the queue that the 2021 post said every order's fulfillment depends on, received a peak of 213 million messages per second, up about 28%. Kinesis Data Streams processed a peak of 988 million records per second, up about 22%.

SQS has grown more than fourfold since 2021, when the peak was 47.7 million messages per second, by PPC Land's calculation. AWS put the 2022 peak at 70.5 million and the 2023 peak at 86 million, a 22% increase by its own account. Between 2023 and 2025 the peak almost doubled.

Amazon SNS appears for the first time, with 5 trillion messages delivered in a single day. With no earlier figure, it has no growth rate.

Security and monitoring grew fastest

The fastest-growing metrics were the ones that watch everything else. GuardDuty, AWS's threat detection service, monitored an average of 14.08 trillion log events per hour, a 59% increase according to AWS. That growth rate has risen three years running: 31.9% in 2024, 48.9% in 2025 and 59% in 2026, each figure as stated by AWS.

CloudTrail, which records API activity across AWS accounts, logged 3.6 trillion events over the four days, a 44% increase according to AWS. That follows a 2025 jump from 976 billion to 2.5 trillion events, about 156% by PPC Land's calculation, as the event doubled in length. In 2017 CloudTrail processed over 50 billion events, so the 2026 figure is about 72 times larger.

CloudWatch, the monitoring service, processed over 2.15 quadrillion metric observations a day. AWS had not given a CloudWatch count before.

Resilience testing grew sixfold

The largest growth rate in the post belongs to preparation rather than traffic. AWS said it ran over 44,000 Fault Injection Service experiments - controlled tests that deliberately break parts of a system to check it recovers - "more than six times what we conducted in 2025." The count has risen from 733 in 2024 to over 6,800 in 2025 and over 44,000 in 2026, about 60 times in two years by PPC Land's calculation. The 2025 post attributed its jump to fault injection support on Fargate and to testing built into deployment pipelines. The 2026 post gives no reason.

A decade of growth

The series goes back to Jeff Barr's post of July 25, 2016, written when Prime Day was a single day. The 2026 post lists earlier editions for 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. There is no 2018 post in that list or among the sources for this article.

DynamoDB's peak shows the arc most clearly. According to the posts, it went from 12.9 million requests per second in 2017 to 45.4 million in 2019, 80.1 million in 2020, 89.2 million in 2021, 105.2 million in 2022, 126 million in 2023, 146 million in 2024, 151 million in 2025 and 192 million in 2026. That is almost 15 times the 2017 level, or average growth of about 35% a year over nine years, by PPC Land's calculation.

Annual growth in that peak, by PPC Land's calculation, was about 76% in 2020, 11% in 2021, 18% in 2022, 20% in 2023, 16% in 2024, 3% in 2025 and 27% in 2026. After years in the mid-teens and a near-flat 2025, the 2026 figure is the second-highest growth rate in the series.

Aurora storage grew about ninefold, from 609 terabytes in 2019 to 5,491 terabytes in 2026, and data transferred about fourfold, from 306 terabytes to 1,194 terabytes. Aurora transactions grew from 148 billion in 2019 to 500 billion in 2025, the last year AWS gave a count.

EBS also shows steep growth. AWS put EBS requests at 2.1 trillion a day in 2019, 6.2 trillion in 2020, 11.1 trillion in 2021, 11.4 trillion in 2022 and a peak of 15.35 trillion in 2023. The 2025 and 2026 posts give peak I/O operations of 20.3 trillion and 24.8 trillion. Read together, the series has grown roughly twelvefold since 2019, by PPC Land's calculation, although AWS has varied the wording of the metric.

CloudFront traffic rose from 450 billion requests in 2020 to over 600 billion in 2021, over 1 trillion in 2023 and over 1.3 trillion in 2024, a 30% increase according to AWS. In 2025 AWS reported over 3 trillion requests across the global week of Prime Day, which it described as a 43% increase.

A note on CloudFront

The 2026 CloudFront figure does not fit the 2025 one. AWS reported over 2.1 trillion requests for the global week of Prime Day 2026 and described it as a 5% increase, while its 2025 post gave over 3 trillion for the same window. AWS has not explained the gap, so the 5% growth rate is AWS's own figure and cannot be confirmed from the published totals.

What the growth means for advertisers

The infrastructure growth contrasts with what advertisers saw. CommerceIQ's first look at Prime Day 2026 found US ordered revenue down 1.7% year over year, product page views down 10.3% and total ad spend down 8.8%, while unit conversion rose 17.1% and unit volume rose 4.9%. Return on ad spend was 4.78x, against 4.73x in 2025. In the EU, revenue rose 20.3% while ad spend fell 18.9%.

The two data sets measure different things. AWS reports the load on Amazon.com's systems worldwide, including fulfillment, security and internal services, while CommerceIQ tracks brands' sales and advertising on Amazon. On those numbers, the extra load on Amazon's systems did not come with bigger advertising budgets in the US or the EU.

The event's timing moved too. Amazon confirmed in April that Prime Day 2026 would run in June, across 22 countries at first, with Australia, Brazil, India and Japan following later in the summer. That brought the event into the second quarter. In Amazon's Q2 2026 results, advertising revenue grew 26% to $19.8 billion and AWS revenue grew 36.7% to $42.2 billion, and Amazon raised its full-year capital expenditure forecast to about $220 billion. CFO Brian Olsavsky said "Prime Day timing shifted this year with the sales event occurring in Q2."

Prime Day is the standard example of what Amazon calls high velocity events, short periods in which traffic, orders and ad demand run far above normal. Product pages, sponsored listings and order confirmations all pass through the services in the AWS post, from the CDN that loads pages to the queues behind fulfillment. Before the June event, CommerceIQ data showed revenue lost to stockouts up about 24% even as on-hand inventory rose about 12%.

The 2026 post does not report the AI metrics that led the 2025 edition. In 2025, AWS said Amazon deployed over 87,000 Inferentia and Trainium chips to power the Rufus shopping assistant and that SageMaker AI processed 626 billion inference requests, up from 145 billion in 2024 - more than fourfold growth, by PPC Land's calculation. The 2026 post gives no AI figures, so the growth of Rufus's infrastructure in 2026 is not known. Amazon has said elsewhere that Rufus drove nearly $12 billion in incremental annualized sales in 2025.

The post closes with a pitch for AWS Countdown Premium, a support program for "retail peak seasons to major sporting events, elections, and healthcare enrollment periods," and a line repeated from 2025: "I look forward to seeing what other records will be broken next year!" It appeared on October 6, 2026, the first day of Prime Big Deal Days, Amazon's 48-hour October event.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Amazon Web Services, in a post by lead blogger Channy Yun, reporting on the infrastructure used by Amazon.com during Prime Day. Earlier editions were written by Jeff Barr from 2016 and jointly with Yun in 2024.

What: Year-on-year growth across most AWS services during Prime Day 2026: GuardDuty log volume up 59%, ElastiCache daily requests up about 53%, ECS tasks up 47.7%, CloudTrail events up 44%, Lambda invocations up about 35%, the DynamoDB peak up about 27% to 192 million requests per second, and Graviton powering up to 49% of Amazon.com's EC2 compute. Fault injection experiments rose more than sixfold to over 44,000. CloudFront grew 5% by AWS's account, a figure that does not match its 2025 total.

When: Published October 6, 2026, covering Prime Day on June 23-26, 2026, compared with the four-day Prime Day of July 8-11, 2025. The longer view draws on AWS posts from July 25, 2016 onward; no 2018 post exists in AWS's list.

Where: The AWS News Blog. Prime Day 2026 ran in 22 countries in June, with Australia, Brazil, India and Japan scheduled for later in the summer.

Why: The growth shows how much more traffic, data and security monitoring Amazon handled during its largest sales event, at a time when US Prime Day ad spend fell 8.8% and the event moved into Amazon's second quarter. For advertisers and sellers, the systems in the post carry the searches, ad clicks, checkouts and order messages that Prime Day budgets pay for.