AWS Case Study: Tapjoy Embraces AWS

The company combines ad aggregation with a virtual goods platform, providing ad networks with a large amount of data and high fill rates to create what Ben Lewis, co-founder of Tapjoy, calls “the most powerful install network available.”

After developing its solution, Tapjoy looked for a source to cultivate its expansion. Lewis says, “AWS had all the tools we needed to grow our system. When we were projecting out potential traffic levels, only AWS really had the resources to support our growth.”

Tapjoy now uses the following AWS products:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to run front-end Web service machines, job machines, and memcached
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to host publisher-facing information
• Amazon SimpleDB to store more than 50 million device records, virtual currency information, and targeting
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store logs, images, and virtual goods
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to handle each transaction and queued activities such as Amazon SimpleDB save retries
• Amazon Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling to manage front ends

Prior to signing on with AWS, Tapjoy was hosted on Rackspace with a Microsoft ASP.NET solution. Lewis notes, “The change in architecture helped us scale much more efficiently, while the change from Rackspace to AWS gave us much more flexibility and support in growing our infrastructure.”

Since shifting its code from Rackspace Cloud to Amazon EC2, the company has benefited from a cost savings of 10x. The savings were even greater when Tapjoy shifted from Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon SimpleDB for its main storage system. Lewis says, “Even though we have grown roughly 50x, our monthly bill is still lower than it was on the old system.”

Tapjoy plans to begin using Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) at a later time for more complex targeting algorithms. Meanwhile, Lewis says of the current services, “The command-line tools make the system extremely flexible. We have complete control over our entire system through very easy-to-maintain scripts.”

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