AWS Case Study: MediaNet Software and PRISA
MediaNet Software is a Spanish IT company offering consultancy services and custom projects for a wide variety of industries, including engineering, healthcare, media, and ecommerce. MediaNet's core technologies include Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE), .NET, Android and iOS mobile solutions, and cloud computing services. The company, which was founded in 1995, currently employs 150 IT professionals.
PRISA is a Spanish and Portuguese-language business group with interests in educational publishing, print, radio, and audiovisual fields. The group also has a digital division incorporated into all of its primary business endeavors. PRISA's global brands, El País, 40 Principales, Santillana, and Alfaguara, reach over 50 million users in twenty-two countries. Nearly 15 thousand people work for the business group throughout Europe and America.
PRISA is a Spanish and Portuguese-language business group with interests in educational publishing, print, radio, and audiovisual fields. The group also has a digital division incorporated into all of its primary business endeavors. PRISA's global brands, El País, 40 Principales, Santillana, and Alfaguara, reach over 50 million users in twenty-two countries. Nearly 15 thousand people work for the business group throughout Europe and America.
Recently, PRISA asked MediaNet to help it create a temporary micro-site promoting an ecommerce website called Planeo (http://www.planeo.com/) Through Planeo, consumers can take advantage of group-based daily deals on a host of goods and activities, including personal care and beauty, restaurants, travel, and sporting events. The micro-site's goal was to generate excitement about Planeo and begin registering users before the launch of the official website.
MediaNet decided to build the micro-site using Amazon Web Services (AWS) because it knew from prior experience that AWS has the necessary elasticity, easy deployment, and convenient management required to meet PRISA's short-term, yet dynamic needs.
The micro-site's registration system included a double opt-in validation mechanism and allowed users to import contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Facebook. The site held competitions to encourage users to invite others to join. To handle this complex system, MediaNet used a collection of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) small instances as a part of its server environment. Small instances in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) served as the foundation for MySQL data storage. The diagram below demonstrates the micro-site's AWS-based architecture:
The micro-site also included Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), which seamlessly integrates with other services in AWS, such as Amazon EC2, to send and receive emails from within applications. Because the micro-site was not meant to be Planeo's permanent user registration system, MediaNet turned to Amazon SES to set up a temporary and cost-effective email system that did not require a long-term contract. Amazon SES also freed up MediaNet from worrying about email server management or network configuration.
During the micro-site's month-long operation prior to the launch of the full Planeo website, Amazon SES handled over 450,000 invitation and registration emails. MediaNet and PRISA also report that their on-demand AWS services cost thirty percent less than comparable services. In fact, the micro-site's AWS infrastructure was so successful that AWS features have been incorporated into the full Planeo website, which launched in May of 2011 and was also completely developed by MediaNet using J2EE technologies.
While PRISA looks forward to growing its group-based daily deals website, MediaNet anticipates completing future projects with AWS as a key infrastructure partner. Mr. César Camargo, CTO of MediaNet explains, "We have a proven record of successful experiences with AWS, thus we will continue to recommend the platform to our customers."
To learn more, visit http://www.medianet.es/ 
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Added July 18, 2011
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