AWS Case Study: G.ho.st
G.ho.st wanted to focus on designing and delivering a web-based operating system, and didn’t want to have to deal with the headaches and costs associated with managing a comprehensive data center. They knew they needed a low friction, cost-effective solution that could be flexible enough to scale as their business did. After reviewing available solutions, G.ho.st determined that Amazon Web Services was the ideal choice.
G.ho.st (Global Hosted Operating SysTem, pronounced “ghost”) is a true web operating system (Web OS). G.ho.st provides a free web-based Virtual Computer (VC) which is available from any browser and includes an attractive personal desktop, files and data, applications and settings. G.ho.st VC works seamlessly with leading web applications in which users can consolidate all their online activities, from any computer, with a single username and password.G.ho.st also boasts free file storage (up to 3GB), G.ho.st Mail, fully automated security, backup, and update features, and more.
The decision to run on AWS was primarily based on the fact that AWS provides all the infrastructure services G.ho.st requires with simple APIs and low price points. G.ho.st is currently using the full suite of Amazon Web Services. Amazon EC2 is used as their scalable server farm, Amazon S3 is used for file storage, Amazon SimpleDB for storing and querying user data, metadata and more, and Amazon SQS powers G.ho.st’s Instant Messenger (IM). G.ho.st’s data center operations are built entirely on Amazon Web Services.
Using this comprehensive suite of solutions, G.ho.st’s system can scale based on customer demand.
“Every aspect of the G.ho.st Global Hosted Operating SysTem is impacted by Amazon Web Services in terms of the scalability, reliability and cost,” said G.ho.st CEO Zvi Schreiber, “AWS is absolutely critical to the incredible scalability and quality-of-service which the G.ho.st Web Operating System delivers, and the low costs of AWS helps us to keep the Virtual Computer absolutely free to the user. In addition, Amazon Web Services have helped us introduce the exciting Ghosh Object Sharing (GHOSH) infrastructure which would be difficult to implement and scale using a more traditional Relational Database Management System (RDBMS).”
G.ho.st estimates that moving onto AWS has saved them 50-70% vs. traditional data center costs. Furthermore, G.ho.st feels that their time-to-market for new product releases is greatly accelerated and their quality of service increased by removing the distractions of managing a large data center infrastructure.
“G.ho.st is continuing to expand the Global Hosted Operating SysTem and is emphasizing integration with all the leading third-party Web based applications and services. In doing so we will continue to utilize whichever Amazon Web Services we can!”
G.ho.st is located in Palestine and Israel and led by an experienced group of Palestinian and Israeli software entrepreneurs, managers, and architects. The Founder and CEO, Zvi Schreiber was previously the founder of Tradeum Inc. (which pioneered business-to-business e-commerce) and Unicorn Inc. (recently acquired by IBM).
For more on G.ho.st, go to http://g.ho.st/
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