AWS Case Study: Grupo El Comercio

Why did you decide to use AWS?

We wanted flexibility and additional control of our platform. Local hosting solutions did not offer the kind of flexibility that Amazon Web Services (AWS) does. We looked at several different cloud solutions, but we determined that AWS has more options than any other provider. We can launch new instances in minutes without having to wait hours to activate new firewall rules.

How have you incorporated Amazon Web Services as part of your architecture? What services are you using and how?

As part of our infrastructure, we have incorporated the following:

• Amazon EC2 for various parts of our infrastructure, including, database, load balancing, proxy, and file and monitoring servers for all our sites
• Amazon S3 for backups
• Amazon ELB to support a high traffic platform that serves static files for all our sites
• Amazon EBS to provide persistence for our data
• Amazon EC2 Elastic IP Addresses for our load balancing infrastructure and providing unique IP addresses for different servers
• Amazon CloudWatch to monitor our critical services

To create our solution, we used our own Git-based tool to deploy our different applications to AWS. We also use open source tools to provision the configuration to our servers as well as the Amazon EC2 API Tool to automate the launch of new instances for our high load sites.

Currently, we have more than 50 instances running, and we handle peaks of up to 2 Gbps of traffic.

How has AWS helped your business?

We like the flexibility AWS offers. With AWS, our business is able to grow according to our needs. Our platform demands different kinds of approaches based on the site traffic and type of service. News sites like elcomercio.pe, peru21.pe, peru.com and others have an intensive use of images and videos reaching peaks of 2GBps of bandwidth on days with big news. Managing that volume of traffic would be impossible without the flexibility of AWS.

Using Amazon EBS, we implemented RAID volumes to support our database infrastructure and improved I/O performance up to 5 times. That’s a big gain for our commercial sites that made heavy use of database systems.

One of our main achievements was the integration of our two main platforms into one big infrastructure environment, reducing costs by using common resources like bandwidth or Amazon EC2 instances.

Have you learned any valuable lessons during this development process that you’d like to pass on to other developers?

AWS brings more flexibility than any other hosting/housing solution so we can do a lot of testing without worrying about costs. We would encourage other companies to constantly evaluate how they can use specific AWS products to improve their infrastructure.

Do you have any future plans to incorporate other AWS solutions?

We always check the new services being released by AWS to see if they have the potential to address any of our needs. We are definitely looking forward to incorporating additional services in the future.

To learn more about how AWS can help your digital marketing needs, visit our Digital Media details page: http://aws.amazon.com/digital-media/.

Added September 10, 2012