Amazon’s Back-End Web

Introduction

Amazon has grown from a small online bookstore to one of the world’s largest online retailers. Its rapid success has been attributed to their innovative and simple methods of reviewing, rating, and recommending goods from diverse vendors. Its success can also be credited to their superb, user-friendly websites. An operational and advanced website must be established to support their fifty-five million active consumer accounts and one million retailer partners worldwide. To do this, around 100-200 services are used to develop their dynamic website (Amazon, 2015).

Website’s Source Code

The website’s source code may be found beneath the bright products, adverts, photos, excellent typography, and prices. It is through this code that the different browsers turns them into delightful experiences for all their buyers and sellers on a daily basis. By pressing CTRL+U on the keyboard while on the Amazon website, the source of the website’s code is seen. By moving the mouse over different parts of the site, the elements of the source code it changes by bringing out the code that displays the section of the website (Gunzel and Holm, 2013).

Title and Meta Description

Once you Google the Amazon website, the title of the site is displayed together with the Meta Description. The meta description is usually a 160-word character free advertisement copy that explains what a website is about to clients. The H1 headings can be observed from the inspecting console in the Amazon website. The H1 headings carry the page’s SEO weight and are found to be used only once on the site. Through using the H1 heading only once as the title, Amazon can boost their SEO as sites like Google can be able to produce them as the first results in their search efficiently. In the Amazon website’s background, the description of the homepage is provided. The description states what Amazon is about and the products that it sells online (Gunzel and Holm, 2013).

Amazon’s Front-End Web

The frontend of a website includes the elements that a user sees and can be able to interact with while viewing them on a browser. It is also defined as the ’clients side.’ The front end includes the texts contained, the buttons, colors, navigation menus, as well as the images. In Amazon’s website, the client-side programing language used is JavaScript. This is because it is lightweight, object-oriented scripting language that can be used across many platforms such as different PC and mobile platforms. The markup language utilized on the website is HTML5. This is because it is the fifth and most recent version of the HTML Standard. From the inspected element in the websites console, the character encoding used is the UTF-8. The Unicode Transformation Format is Variable length encoding for Unicode characters (Marcotte, 2017).

Image Formats and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Different formats for images can be observed from the website’s code. Portable Network Graphics (PNG) is suitable for storing graphics which contain uniformly colored areas because it is a lossless free format. The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is used by developers for Amazon to store detailed pictures because it uses a lossy compression method. Finally, the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is mostly used to save different store’s logos, store graphics, as well as animations (Gunzel and Holm, 2013).

Different site elements can be observed. Different types of Cascading style sheets define how the elements that are contained on the website will look like and where they will be placed. The external CSS defines the rules that govern a page in a separate CSS file. This type of CSS is not contained in the console. The Embedded CSS defines the style rules for the elements contained within the website. It can be seen to contain the tag. The inline CSS applies its rules directly within the (x) HTML element (Marcotte, 2017).

Default Subdomains and Protocols

The default subdomains in the websites redirect users to other pages contained in the primary domain. The subdomains are seen to change user pages from example.com to www.example.com. On the other hand, default protocol https on the website redirect site visitors to SSL encryption which uses the http:\/\/example.com method. Going through the Amazon page’s code, three structured data formats are seen. They include the open graph, twitter cards, and the generic RDFa. The open graph data protocol enables the Amazon website to become part of a social graph such as Facebook. The twitter cards allow the automatic sharing of videos, photos, and other media attachments to twitter directly. Finally, the Generic Resource Description Framework ensure no specialization (Marcotte, 2017).

HTML, JavaScript, and CSS

Together, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS develop everything that can be visually seen once a client visits the Amazon website. Some of the other frameworks such as Bootstrap and jQuery are considered extensions and their primary purpose are to make long codes organized and manageable by providing tools and already made templates to be used (Carver, 2014).

Amazon’s Back-End Web

Even if a frontend is well-designed, it cannot perform as well without a backend support. Also if a website is beautified with cool features, clients will be turned away if the site does not show well what is required. The backend is mainly concerned with Amazon’s applications running slowly or crushing (Carver, 2014). In the Amazon’s online store, a lot of database interactions take place as well as calculations that are required to ensure consistency in performance. This means that all the backend code for the site runs on Amazon’s servers rather than the client-side (Marcotte, 2017).

Programming Languages and Database Query

Considering the performance of Amazon, the following programming languages are incorporated in the server side. PHP is one of the most popular styles and is popular in the content management systems and frameworks. PHP is used to upload and download items on the Amazon website both from the clients and the managers. Ruby on the Amazon website is commonly used to efficiently calculate data, coding business logic, as well as distributing servers across platforms to ensure Amazon runs smoothly. Python is mainly utilized by Amazon to provide security of their payment systems and their databases (Gunzel and Holm, 2013).

Since Amazon is a stellar company, it has to incorporate a database query language such as the Structured Query Language (SQL). SQL is essential for websites and applications that require storage of large sets of information. SQL is also used to access and interact with different servers (Carver, 2014).

Application Program Interface (API) and Payment Processors

Application program interface defines how different software that is used in servers should act. APIs allow back-end developers at Amazon to integrate various services that are in different departments to work together. For example, Amazon can use KeyCDN API to embed a CDN that will be used in the online site’s applications to set up rules that should be followed when specific regulations and actions are triggered (Gunzel and Holm, 2013).

Amazon receives payment for goods bought, and hence payment processors have to be included in their servers. Including web services such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State Transfer (REST) will bring together the frontend and backend services. Through the SOAP and REST technologies, will incorporate social media networks and payment methods to work together (Marcotte, 2017).

Server Infrastructure and Security

Most of the core technology that keeps the Amazon webpage running is Linux-based. The 28 Hewlett Packard servers that consist of four central processing units run the Oracle 9i database software. The data warehouse of Amazon is divided to three. The Query, Historical, and Extract transform, and load (ETL) pull data from a source and run or integrate it to another. Through the employment of Netscape Secure Commerce Server all the credit card numbers can be stored in a different database that cannot be accessed through the internet. This makes sure that hackers are put at bay. Also, the buyers can be able to enter part of their credit card numbers once over the internet and then the rest through their mobile phones once their order is received. To avoid phishing that takes place over fake emails, it has developed robust security protocols and guidelines for customers to know the difference between real and counterfeit emails (Carver, 2014).

Conclusion

In conclusion, proper development of the Amazon website has seen it shift from being a simple online store to becoming an online market powerhouse. This can be attributed to its perfect front-end web design that attracts customers to its website and the backend development. The server side of the site controls what the clients can see and buy. The servers are distributed across different situations in the world, and Netscape secure servers secure the payment section. To remain a powerhouse, Amazon has to be in the know about the new front and backend technologies.

References

Amazon, E. C. (2015). Amazon web services. Available in: http://aws. Amazon. Com/es/ec2/ (November 2012).

Carver, M. (2014). The responsive web. Manning Publications Co.

Günzel, F., & Holm, A. B. (2013). One size does not fit all-understanding the front-end and back-end of business model innovation. International Journal of Innovation Management, 17(01), 1340002.

Marcotte, E. (2017). Responsive web design: A book apart n° 4. Editions Eyrolles.