AWS Case Study: GeneXus

Artech was founded in 1988.  From its headquarters in Uruguay and global offices in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and Japan, the company delivers GeneXus technologies to 70,000 developer worldwide. 

The Business Challenges
The primary challenge that Artech encountered upon launching GeneXus Server was making it immediately available to 70,000 developer across the globe. When the company decided that the best option was to offer the product as a service, it investigated various approaches to achieve this objective.  The requirements were fairly straight-forward: 

• Easy setup and configuration of servers with varied and resizable capacity.
• Reduction of infrastructure costs. 

Why Amazon Web Services?
After extensive research, Artech determined that Amazon Web Services (AWS) offered the best solution. The company felt that Amazon’s experience and success spoke for itself –as an innovator of cloud computing, Amazon had a major advantage over the competition and could effectively guide Artech through its new venture.  Additionally, Amazon’s pricing structure was another key factor in the decision.  Because users pay only for computing power used, it opened the door to huge savings.

Jose Lamas, GeneXus Server Product Manager elaborates:  “Computing infrastructure is no easy business, and costs can easily go out of control if you can’t accurately predict your needs in advance.  Using AWS, you have no need to predict:  you just pay for what you use, and you can be sure that whenever you need more capacity you can have it without hassles and without delays.  Meanwhile, you can keep your focus on your actual business doing what you do best.”

The Business Benefits
Since switching to AWS, Artech has realized enormous benefits – especially in the areas of cost reduction and rapid product deployment. 

Amazon’s pricing structure has significantly reduced infrastructure expenses.  By scaling up or down as necessary, Artech is guaranteed that it pays only for the exact computing capacity used.  The capability of adjusting capacity as needed – within hours or even minutes – provides flexibility that is not attainable with a traditional colocation solution.

Artech runs many instances of GeneXus Server in multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Windows instances.  When additional capacity is needed, instances are resized or new instances are created.  For customers who have GeneXus Server on-site, the company uses Amazon EC2 to quickly reproduce a problem by replicating a similar configuration in a new instance.  Once the problem is resolved, the instance is stopped or discarded.  The capability to manage instances in this way has saved the company many hours and thousands of dollars in infrastructure expenses. 

Choosing Amazon EC2 has empowered Artech to quickly deploy products to its customer base.  As Jose Lamas explains, “We opted for Amazon Web Services and are glad of that decision, because its intuitive and frictionless interface allowed us to quickly and effectively deploy our service, significantly reducing our costs and time-to-market.”

The rapid deployment of products and scalability of servers has prompted Artech to look at other AWS products.  With a mind toward the future, the company is experimenting with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for building, deploying, and testing services in the cloud.

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

Added December 7, 2011