AWS Case Study: CloudAngels and imageloop.com

CloudAngels is a consulting company which specializes in providing IT infrastructure migration and integration services, as well as backend application development and architecture planning.

The CloudAngels team’s background is in application development and system administration in the banking as well as the document/content management sector. In these environments, they found that obtaining the correct hardware was often a laborious and expensive process. The more they experienced projects being impeded by hosting related factors, the more they became disillusioned with traditional vendors of hosting systems and started to look for alternatives. They quickly became convinced of the game-changing level of flexibility and ease of use that cloud computing systems such as Amazon Web Services offered and opened shop in 2008.

At first they began developing widget backends for various agencies and were approached in late 2008 by imageloop.com, the biggest European slideshow provider. Imageloop was experiencing scalability issues and CloudAngels therefore recommended taking their service to the next level on Amazon Web Services cloud.

During the platform migration, CloudAngels used Amazon SQS to convert imageloop.com’s image stock in the multi-terabyte range into simplified output formats and stored all image content data on Amazon S3. This accomplishment of converting millions upon millions of images in just a few hours would previously not have been possible. But with a fleet of sixty EC2 instances it took less than two days to process and have the images ready on the cloud. Imageloop.com’s complete application was then migrated to AWS.

The result was a much faster and more flexible application that cut costs by two thirds. Stefan Riehl, imageloop.com’s CEO says, “Scalability is a critical success factor of web 2.0 applications that typically go viral within just a few days or weeks. It was only with the help of CloudAngels and the technology benefits of Amazon Web Services that we were able to manage the exploding demands on our service’s infrastructure”.

CloudAngels cost model for the integration was only a percentage of the cost savings imageloop.com enjoyed, another key benefit for imageloop’s migration to the cloud.

Due to the increasingly demanding requirements in the social media area, CloudAngels is working closely with widget experts, widgetlabs, and the leading German social network promotion company, thanksforaddingme. Through these collaborations, CloudAngels is extending its range of expertise from enterprise and web 2.0 applications to social gaming and other related projects.

CloudAngels is based in Germany and consults clients all over Europe. To learn more, go to http://www.cloudangels.com/ This link will launch in a new browser window or tab. .