How we powered up Amazon's intranet

Amazon is one of the world's leading multinational technology companies, with various focuses such as e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence.

Founded in 1994, it started as an online marketplace for books but expanded to sell electronics, software, video games, apparel, and more. It is the world's largest online marketplace, AI assistant provider, a live-streaming platform, and cloud computing platform. Amazon is known for both its technological innovation and mass scale.

Amazon has chosen XWiki as its next generation internal Wiki platform for documentation and collaborationg. It is being used by nearly 20,000 active users, mostly engineering and product teams in the company for knowledge sharing and documentation.

Amazon picked XWiki after undergoing an evaluation process on other available wiki solutions found on wikimatrix.org, among which TWiki and Confluence.

The decision to choose XWiki came after careful consideration, but there were also various reasons why it was the right tool:

• it comes with latest documentation features
• it is a flexible tool and can scale to handle millions of pages
• it is extensible and can be used to build custom modifications
• it provides security and confidentiality features
• it is supported by a thriving developer community

The Solution

Amazon consulted the XWiki SAS team for providing guidance and expert architecture reviews to build custom components in XWiki. Amazon found XWiki's source code to be well organized, tested for quality and modularized, enabling Amazon's engineers to build customized solutions such as integrating the platform with AWS services like EC2, S3 and RDS.

The XWiki SAS team helped train Amazon engineers through a series of both on-site and virtual training sessions to learn best practices to successfully build on the platform. In particular, the XWiki SAS team helped Amazon design solutions which would continue to be compatible with future platform versions. Besides providing training support, the XWiki SAS team also offered operations support in resolving critical issues within few hours or, at most, a few days.

We're very happy to count Amazon as an XWiki user, validating all the efforts spent on making XWiki an open and performant platform that can be adapted to any use case.

The team worked with the developer community to integrate the required features into the platform for both the benefit of all XWiki users and Amazon's.

XWiki delivered the following features under tight timelines and on schedule, enabling Amazon to successfully launch the platform to its employees:

• hierarchical pages and permissions
• scripting permissions
• CKEditor integration to provide the best WYSIWYG editing experience