AWS Case Study: Eyejot

After recording, a link is emailed to the message recipient as an invitation to watch the video. While Eyejot's basic service is free, the company also offers paid PRO and PRO Plus services that include additional features, such as longer recording times and corporate branding. Although originally only intended for traditional web browsers, Eyejot's developers are in the process of expanding the service into mobile devices. Currently, the platform has users in over 100 countries.

Eyejot initially began operating from its own servers in a Seattle-based facility. However, in early 2011, the company migrated nearly all of its data and compute activities to Amazon Web Services (AWS). David Geller, Eyejot's CEO and Founder explains, "We liked the promise and model of cloud computing. We recognize and accept that hardware fails. Moving into Amazon's cloud resources has removed a great deal of IT overhead and potential risk from hardware failures that we would normally have to manage on our own."

Eyejot's AWS infrastructure incorporates several different services, including the resizable computing environment, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and the durable storage option, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The platform also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for scalable storage and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) as independent storage volumes for Amazon EC2 instances. Additionally, Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) gives the company convenient bulk email-sending, which easily integrates with all of Eyejot's other AWS services.

During migration to AWS, the company utilized a variety of third-party services to transition files into Amazon S3, including SubCloud, a shared enterprise file system, and FUSE, the filesystem in userspace program. Today, Eyejot also uses Scalr, a third-party service for Amazon EC2 provision management.

As Eyejot's platform moves into mobile devices, the company is confident that AWS will provide the support and scalability necessary to handle increased demand. In fact, the company is looking to introduce additional resources from AWS, such as the Domain Name System (DNS) service, Amazon Route 53, and the Amazon EC2 Elastic Load Balancing feature for traffic management between instances. In the future, Eyejot also intends to conduct more of its own provision management through the Amazon Management Console and the resource management service, Amazon CloudWatch, as well as other native AWS configuration tools.

Eyejot reports that its Amazon Web Services are less expensive and easier to establish than other cloud services. Most importantly, the company feels assured that with the stability of AWS, its video mail platform will enjoy increasing user adoption for both personal and business use.

Geller notes, "AWS has, frankly, taken the worry out of operating a complex computing platform like Eyejot. Running on AWS means we're able to concentrate on enhancing our platform and attracting new clients rather than worrying about hardware maintenance and refresh cycles. The vast storage resources AWS provides means we're no longer constrained by our own storage components. This is extremely important for everyone associated with Eyejot."

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

Added July 22, 2011