AWS Case Study: Conduit Goes Elastic

With Conduit’s help, major global brands such as Fox News, Major League Baseball, Travelocity, Softonic, and TechCrunch, along with hundreds of thousands of smaller communities and businesses, now offer their own “Conduits” as extensions of their Web sites and business models.

Before signing up with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Conduit was using its own hosting infrastructure as well as a number of third-party services. Guy Malachi, Chief Geek at Conduit, says, “We chose AWS, because we found them to be the most readily available and mature cloud infrastructure in terms of scalability, ease of use, and ongoing geographic coverage. In addition, the full range of Amazon’s cloud type offering (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS) aligns well with our internal architectural concept and requirements.”

Conduit has massive volumes of traffic that can only be supported by a truly scalable solution. Malachi gives the following example: “The Coke Zero/Avatar Web app was distributed to 1 million users in the Conduit network 24 hours after the first activation. Ten days later, the campaign had reached 8 million people in over 30 countries and generated nearly 1 million minutes of total viewing/engagement time.”

In another example, users of Pitsi, a virtual pet mini-game that can be played from the chrome of a web browser, interacted with the game more than 66,000,000 times in its first 10 weeks. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) enables Conduit’s services to “scale without having to pre-commit hardware resources in our private Web farms,” says Malachi. “Now we don’t need to worry about expansion of our core business and can focus on development.”

Combining its platform with AWS allows Conduit’s publishers to easily develop and distribute applications without worrying about scaling. Malachi says, “Our publishers must flawlessly service huge communities around the world. AWS allows us to offer the perfect solution for leading brands as well as smaller publishers.”

In the near future, Conduit plans to evaluate the use of Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS). For now, the Conduit team appreciates Amazon Web Services’ ease of use, scalability, quality of service, ongoing product enhancements, and constant growth in geographic coverage. Malachi says, “The AWS platform enabled us to significantly reduce operational costs by reducing time-to-market from the business requirements phase to final product delivery.”

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