AWS Case Study: Futbol Club Barcelona

The Business Challenges
One of Gnuine’s main products is Ubiquo Sports, a specialized SaaS content management system (CMS) focused on solving the specific needs of sport organizations, including FCBarcelona, which runs Ubiquo Sports entirely on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.

Why Amazon Web Services
Lluí­s Alsina FCBarcelona Online Manager, says they decided to use AWS based on elasticity and the pay-per-use model.
Ramon Salvadó, CTO of gnuine, was pleased with this decision. He comments, “We already had a lot of experience with AWS from several previous projects, all with good results.” He adds, “Scaling, provisioning, and security are very important for us and for our customers. AWS is a natural fit, because it allows us to have virtually unlimited capacity while only paying for what we use without upfront investments. AWS also makes it easy to deal with traffic spikes, which are common in sports, thanks to its elastic capabilities.”

The Business Benefits
The Gnuine solution for FCBarcelona uses a number of AWS products:

• Amazon Route 53 for name resolution.
• Amazon CloudFront as a content delivery network (CDN) for fast media and assets delivery.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for scalable assets and media documents storage.
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB) and Auto Scaling for dynamic generated HTML and XML pages.
• Amazon CloudWatch for alarms and service monitoring.
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) for several platform notifications.
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) as a database service (MySQL).
• Amazon CloudFormation for automation and provisioning.

Pep Gubau, CEO of gnuine, describes the tools used to build the solution: “The FCBarcelona website uses the latest HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS advancements and techniques and is powered by our Ubiquo Sports SaaS CMS. Ubiquo Sports is based on Ubiquo, which is our open source CMS platform based on Ruby on Rails. For interfacing with AWS, we are using Amazon S3, the AWS Ruby gems, and the Amazon SDK for Java. We are using Varnish Cache which is an open source application accelerator. We are also using Puppet for our configuration management needs, and the Amazon Linux AMI, with very good results.”

The FCBarcelona web platform boasts over 6,000 pages and over 12,000 digitized photographs. It is available in six languages and consolidates up-to-date information for five elite professional teams.

Salvadó says, “We are very happy with Amazon CloudFormation, because it means we are able to use ‘one-click’ deployment of our whole infrastructure.” He advises other developers: “Look into Amazon CloudFormation and spot instances. They have a lot of potential to save you time and money.”

Overall, says Lluí­s Alsina “AWS provides us with scalable and flexible hosting solutions. The elastic cloud solution is ideal for platforms that support traffic peaks. This solution represents a significant savings for us.”

Salvadó adds, “AWS is really a game changer because it removes the need to devote a lot of the dedication and resources to micro-manage your own platform. AWS is key for us. As a service provider, it allows us to combine the best time to market and technical capability with very competitive prices and a pay-per-use model. Because AWS is strategic for us, we also have an AWS specialized team to provide services for our customers.”

To learn more, visit http://www.fcbarcelona.com/ .

Added January 9, 2012