AWS Case Study: gnuine/La Vanguardia

Recently, gnuine provided services to La Vanguardia, Spain’s fourth-best selling daily newspaper. La Vanguardia wanted to provide the best coverage for municipal elections in 2011. To assist them, gnuine developed several applications:

• An interactive website with both historical and realtime data during the vote counting period (see http://elecciones-2011.lavanguardia.com) 
• A mobile app for Android and iPhone, which, according to gnuine, was number one in the App Store on election day
• Several desktop and web widgets

For this project, gnuine used the following solutions from Amazon Web Services (AWS):

• Amazon CloudFront as a content delivery network (CDN) for static content like historical data, images, CSS, javascripts, etc.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for static content with high refresh rates like config files
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for live and real time data, and as a source for Amazon CloudFront

To build this solution, gnuine used Ubiquo as a key piece. Salvadó says, “This open source CMS framework based on Ruby on Rails has been extracted from our work on several projects.” He continues, “For all our programmatic needs when interfacing with AWS we used the AWS RubyGem (developed by Rightscale) as well as custom developed scripts and libraries using Ruby.”

Salvadó notes that choosing AWS for this project was a “no brainer.” He explains, “We knew we were going to deal with high amounts of peak traffic concentrated during a few hours surrounding the event. We all know how difficult it is in a situation like this to provision all the resources you may need to provide a good service because your estimations may be surpassed. So, we chose AWS for its elastic nature, giving us confidence that we would be able to provide the right level of resources needed for a good user experience, while only paying for what we used.” 

The team was able to set up the architecture in two days and used three additional days to perform load testing and make adjustments. Salvadó reports that during the event, in just a few hours, they served more than one billion requests and used more than 5.5 TB of bandwidth.

In working with AWS, Salvadó has appreciated the power it offers to IT staff, and the ability to use the service without having to go through sales representatives. He says, “You can start working with AWS now. You don't need to be convinced by anybody. You can start solving your problem or building your solution right now.” He adds: “AWS is key for us because it allows us to combine the best time to market and technical capability with very competitive prices and a pay-as-you-go model.”

Salvadó recommends that others considering working with AWS not spend too much time trying to evaluate if it is a good fit. He says, “Start using it for a side project to gain confidence and remove uncertainty.”
The company has been using AWS services for some time, and plans to continue doing so. Salvadó estimates that 50 to 75 percent of gnuine’s new projects use AWS.

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

Added October 3, 2011