Yeah, it does, and thanks for taking the time to point me at something a little meatier than slides.
I guess it's just hard to imagine that kind of situation when I'm on a two man web dev team that pushes out into the testing server 10-20 times a day and to production once a week, if that.
Our systems are extremely modular. We've previously disclosed that in excess of a hundred discrete services may be called to generate a single page on our web site. You can find more info about that at the following link.
http://highscalability.com/amazon-architecture
When we refer to a deployment at Amazon it means a single code push to one or more servers. For example, if you deploy a new piece of code to a thousand hosts that counts as one deployment. In other words a distinct update is pushed every 11.6 seconds.
Hopefully that makes sense.