AWS Case Study: Eton Digital and StudentBox

Eton Digital is a web 2.0 digital design agency based in the Thames Valley. They use open source software (symfony and Drupal) to build large social networks, enterprise e-commerce applications and content management systems and related web applications. Some of their recent clients include Yell.com, TopupTV, SKIPSO, Pod3.TV, and Air Valid. While these clients all came to Eton Digital with different project goals, they all shared two fundamental concerns: cost and scalability. To resolve their concerns, Eton Digital turned to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to help them deliver scalable and cost-effective solutions.

StudentBox is an online community focused on students and their way of life. It integrates social networking components (relationship building and viral marketing) to allow the flow of information in and out of a large student community. StudentBox founder Carl Pihl approached Eton Digital with a problem. They required a cost-effective new storage solution for its large and rapidly growing collection of images and videos. Eton Digital instantly recommended a hosted infrastructure solution using Amazon EC2 and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to store the large amount of photos and videos.

StudentBox uses Amazon S3 to store all media files from videos, audio, images, and more. Amazon EC2 is used for converting media-file formats, online video editing and processing all programs through the system for daily re-distribution. Amazon EC2 is also used to support client-side software allowing customers to securely upload files to StudentBox’s Amazon S3 account.

With a track record of success with Amazon Web Services, StudentBox will look to AWS as the first option when architecting any new service. The scalability, reliability, and availability of AWS allows StudentBox to focus on innovation and meeting their member’s needs.

Boban Tanovic, Managing Director at Eton Digital explains, “In a traditional, non-AWS setup, StudentBox would have had to commit to spending a large sum of money on infrastructure and would only be guaranteed a finite amount of capacity.”

Eton Digital has multiple client success stories similar to StudentBox which showcase Amazon Web Services elastic, always-available nature. AIR VALID is a survey and publication company which gathers information about 1176 airlines around the world. The company collects data from international economy and charter flights. AIR VALID provides administrative, commercial, and technical information about the airline companies in its database. AIR VALID has expanded rapidly the last two years into UK, German, Spanish, Indian, and Chinese Markets.

“With Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 in place, I can now focus on expanding the business in the US and other new markets, rather than worrying about the hardware, racks, routers, firewalls and the supporting data centers” says Arnaud Bilquez, Founder and CEO at AIR VALID and EEZEER, a new web 2.0 service for airline reviews, soon to be launched on AWS. “We are teaming up with large travel agencies in our market and they can rely on our production capacity, knowing that we are running on Amazon Web Services.”

These are just a few examples which have made Eton Digital believers in Amazon Web Services. Eton Digital continues to look for ways they can use AWS’ infrastructure services for their clients and themselves. Tanovic comments: “We chose Amazon Web Services because of its cost structure and scalability. If a system is architected properly, using these services, one can launch a campaign or application on a shoestring budget and scale the application as needed without requiring a large support team.”

Eton Digital is based in the Thames Valley and consults clients all over Europe. To learn more, go to http://www.etondigital.com/ This link will launch in a new browser window or tab. .