AWS Case Study: fruux

Started as a student project in Germany in 2007, fruux is a synchronization application that allows Apple users to synchronize their calendar of events, address book entries, tasks, Safari bookmarks, and notes between multiple computers. Initially, fruux was available as a free download, but it has grown into a for-profit organization with an internationally known and utilized application. The developers at fruux report that the application has helped users to sync approximately 200 thousand tasks, 10 million bookmarks, 17 million calendar events, and 20 million address book entries.

Although the synchronization application was developed on local machines, fruux has employed Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host its application since its public beta-launch. The company uses Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) to run its nginx Web servers. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is fruux’s choice for versioned application code and backup storage. In addition, fruux uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to manage its central databases. The synchronization application itself was developed using the Cocoa® framework in Objective-C.

fruux architecture diagram

The fruux development team explored a variety of solutions and ultimately chose AWS because of its ease of use and scalability. Dominik Tobschall, Co-Founder of fruux, says AWS met the company’s requirements because “it’s easy and speedy to fire up instances in the AWS cloud. It wasn’t necessary to sign dozens of contracts while waiting days for confirmations or system administrator set-up. With AWS we just decide on the resources we need and launch them.” Tobschall also believes that the decision to use AWS has saved the company a tremendous amount of man hours.

In the near future, fruux will be extending its application to include Apple’s mobile devices. The company also hopes to re-launch a free version of its application to compliment its paid version soon. In the process of creating these new offerings, fruux will rely more heavily on Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS. In addition to conventional database sharding, the fruux development team is particularly interested in using the Amazon RDS read replica feature, which improves the scalability of read-heavy database instances. As an extension of the application, fruux hopes to eventually integrate Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) for sync event handling. Additionally, fruux is planning to migrate its website and blog from their current hosts to AWS.

fruux has made full use of a variety of solutions offered by AWS to grow their student project into an internationally-known application. Tobschall explains that AWS has allowed the company “to build our application in a way that wouldn’t lock us in, and right now, it looks like we’re in with AWS for the long haul.”

To learn more, visit http://fruux.com/ This link will launch in a new browser window or tab. .