AWS Case Study: With appMobi, FlyCast Hooks a Winner in AWS

The FlyCast team uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) at every level. They use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storage of the application source code and binaries, Amazon CloudFront to serve media and application downloads, Amazon DevPay for billing, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for a variety of functions, including adaptive bit rate streaming and media transcoding.

According to FlyCast VP, Biz Dev, and Co-founder Joe Monastiero, the FlyCast team chose AWS for two primary reasons. “Number one: the confidence inspired in our customers knowing our infrastructure is backed by Amazon. And number two: the diversity of services Amazon offers and the ease with which they can be integrated.”

Monastiero estimates the cost savings associated with not prebuilding out in anticipation of demand has saved FlyCast over US$200,000 in capital equipment, bandwidth pre-commits, and development costs as well as more than six months in time-to-market.

“If you need to leverage a cloud,” says Monastiero, “have a little faith that you’ll be able to accomplish what you need with AWS.” He was, he admits, originally “daunted” by the number of services Amazon offers and recommends that a new client “bite off small projects at first” to gain familiarity with and knowledge of the general methodology of integrating AWS.

The FlyCast team is fully invested in AWS components, planning live video endcoding, transcoding, and segmenting in the cloud as their next—as Monastiero says—“project/product/battlefield.”

What the FlyCast team likes most about AWS is the consolidated billing Amazon is able to offer customers for a diversity of services and their belief the platform will continually be extended. “Simply put, without AWS, we would not have been able to offer our appMobi service in any way that was financially feasible,” says Monastiero.

FlyCast CTO Sam Abadir agrees. “Amazon has been a lifeline to our business. Our appMobi platform, considered cutting edge in a cloud-based, cross-platform mobile application development and deployment, would not exist if it were not for AWS. The time-to-market and cost savings we’ve realized using AWS may end up being one of the primary reasons for our success.”

To learn more about FlyCast’s appMobi developer ecosystem, visit http://www.appmobi.com .