AWS Case Study: GoAnimate

The GoAnimate team believes everyone has good stories to tell. However, for the majority, the tools available for expression are very limited. GoAnimate was created to provide an outlet for everyone's creativity and ideas. GoAnimate is a fun Web application that lets users easily make cartoon animations, for free, in just 10 minutes, without having to draw. Users can even create their own cast of characters.

GoAnimate

The application provides all the elements needed to make a cartoon, including backgrounds, voices, characters, props, music, and special effects. The process involves simply laying these elements out scene by scene to make an animation. GoAnimate helps users unlock funny stories and great ideas, and now hosts more than 1.5 million user-generated cartoons.

The GoAnimate team consists of 16 people based in Hong Kong and New York.

Prior to signing on with Amazon Web Services (AWS), GoAnimate rented dedicated servers. Alvin Hung, Founder and CEO of GoAnimate, says, “It was important to put our tech stack on a flexible and cost effective architecture. Combing the LAMP stack together with AWS proved to be the right choice. AWS has allowed us to focus our resources on our product, instead of managing a complex datacenter.”

The entire GoAnimate Website is now on AWS. The team is using the following AWS Services:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to host its webservers

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for its database

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon CloudFront to serve static content

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to help coordinate asynchronous jobs such as video encoding and outbound e-mail processing

“The ability to bring up and shut down instances easily has given us much more flexibility,” comments Hung. “For example, we sometimes bring up instances for testing before we release patches to our production servers. On the average, I believe AWS is reducing our development time by 20 to 30 percent.” Hung notes that GoAnimate has seen conversion rates go up since deploying their content on Amazon CloudFront.

The team is looking into using additional AWS services: Auto Scaling, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon SimpleDB.

Hung says, “AWS is not just a Web hosting service. Amazon's products work hand-in-hand to provide us a complete and cost-effective solution that increases our productivity and allows us to scale as fast as we want. It’s a joy to work with AWS because the pieces fit so well together; as a result, our development time is reduced.”

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