AWS Case Study: CITYTECH, Inc. and CaringBridge

CITYTECH incorporates Amazon Web Services (AWS) into its own corporate architecture and that of its enterprise solutions. Specifically, the CITYTECH managed infrastructure service utilizes Amazon Route 53 for Domain Name System (DNS) services and Amazon CloudFront for content delivery. The managed infrastructure service platform also receives computation and storage scalability through Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon SimpleDB.

Matt Van Bergen, CITYTECH CTO, notes, “CITYTECH believes that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the future, and Amazon provides the most diverse and robust set of APIs and services of any IaaS provider. We continually evaluate providers of infrastructure; Amazon continues to out-distance any competitor’s feature set.”

In addition to its managed infrastructure service, CITYTECH also uses a variety of AWS features to operate its corporate data center, which include the consultancy’s Intranet, billing system, continuous integration software, and other internal applications.

The web services provider, CaringBridge, recently turned to CITYTECH for guidance in developing a cloud-based strategy to improve its network. CaringBridge is a free service that allows people with significant health challenges to create their own websites for the purpose of staying in touch with family and friends. The individual CaringBridge websites let users post health updates and photos, in addition to receiving supportive messages through virtual guestbooks.

According to CaringBridge, its network has users in over 225 countries and territories worldwide. The network helps thousands of people connect every day, and the individual sites have received more than 1 billion visits.

CITYTECH began by helping CaringBridge identify bottlenecks within its existing infrastructure. Then, the consultancy aided CaringBridge in overcoming those obstacles by implementing a content delivery network based on Amazon CloudFront, with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) acting as a persistence layer. Amazon S3 also stores a portion of CaringBridge’s static content. Currently, some static content is also being housed in local network-attached storage; however, that content will be moved to Amazon S3 in the near future.

Since instituting CITYTECH’s solution based on AWS, CaringBridge reports better website performance for users throughout its network. And better website performance ultimately leads to improved user experiences for the individuals with health challenges, the family and friends offering support, and the donors providing financial contributions.

CITYTECH’s consultants help a wide-variety of organizations, such as CaringBridge, craft individualized enterprise solutions. Many of these solutions, in addition much of CITYTECH’s own infrastructure, rely on cloud-based technology. According to CITYTECH Senior Cloud Architect Christian Vozar, CITYTECH is moving forward into the future with AWS because, “Amazon provides a level of flexibility and scalability at a cost-point to IT infrastructure that is simply impossible with any other vendor or on-premise solution.”

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

Added May 31, 2011