AWS Case Study: LiveLeader

The company, based in Oslo, Norway, estimates that they’ve saved nearly $200,000 by deploying on AWS. The founders cut their teeth building Norway’s leading content management system (CMS) vendor, so they are very familiar with the costs involved in rolling your own infrastructure.

“For us, the biggest advantage was not having to worry about scaling relational databases,” says Kyrre Wathne, Chief Architect of LiveLeader. “Amazon SimpleDB meant we did not have to spend hundreds of hours on database replication setups to achieve only limited scalability. Instead, Amazon SimpleDB let us focus on building the application. And Amazon SimpleDB really delivers in terms of performance.”

LiveLeader uses Amazon Web Services across the board. Amazon EC2 instances are used as web servers and load balancers, Amazon SimpleDB stores structured data, and Amazon S3 is used for persistent file storage. “The pay-as-you-go model of AWS suits us perfectly” says Wathne. “Without AWS, we would have had to make considerable investments to ensure the level of reliability that our users expect.”

Other unique benefits of AWS became apparent as LiveLeader’s product development progressed. “Before you get used to the idea of programmatically accessing your computational resources, it’s hard to see all the possibilities.” says Wathne. “A major benefit is the ease with which we can set up test clusters to test new versions. And rolling out new versions used to be such a headache. With AWS we just launch a fresh production cluster without a second of downtime.”

“Once you’ve entered the AWS world, the thought of leaving it is not pleasant,” continues Wathne. “With AWS, world-class infrastructure is suddenly within the reach of smaller companies like ours.”

http://liveleader.com