Out of thousands of cool startups, this happened to Jamglue, an online community for music mixing. Jamglue, a Seattle-based startup run by three co-founders, launched their private beta in October 2006 and saw traffic spikes in November accompanying mentions in TechCrunch, Mashable and Wired. Jamglue successfully made a full release in December 2006 with about 2500 registered community members.

Jamglue was able to go to market quickly by using Amazon Web Services as their infrastructure solution. Gautam Jayaraman, co-founder of Jamglue recalls the decision, “We were drawn in by Amazon S3 with its promise of cheap scalable storage, and were excited to reduce the risk of data loss. Then when we heard the Amazon EC2 beta announcement we realized it would be very useful to us as well. The simple APIs, reasonable pay-as-you-go pricing and sound backend architecture impressed us.”

Unlike other start-ups who build their own infrastructure based on anticipated traffic, Jamglue was able to meet popularity demands thanks to their web-scale computing architecture powered by Amazon Web Services. Jayaraman says, “We’ve already scaled our traffic by about 10x since launch without having to invest in new hardware.” Jamglue is continuing to grow, serving nearly 100,000 music files per day, and they rely on Amazon Web Services to enable their growth.

Jamglue currently uses Amazon S3 to store their large music library, Flash files, and images and they use Amazon EC2 to power their backend audio processing. Jamglue built and launched their service using Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 and has saved considerable time and money. For instance, because their files are stored in Amazon S3, when “Jamglued” music ends up on MySpace and other high-traffic sites they do not create any server traffic until they are played.

Not only is Jamglue free to focus on developing an innovative application without having to worry about buying, configuring, and managing hardware, but they are also able to reduce costs and operate with far fewer developers and servers than their competitors.

“AWS gave us access to a bottomless supply of cheap, worry-free storage and CPU, allowing us to concentrate on building an ambitious project in a short amount of time. We got to avoid thinking about scaling our storage, without the normal consequences of getting blindsided by scalability problems down the road.”

Using Amazon Web Services, Jamglue has been able to operate a lean, competitive business with little operating costs. The original idea of Jamglue was created out of necessity, when two band members divided by physical location wanted to make music collaboration easier over the internet. The idea has evolved into a community where people who normally just listen to music can actually play around and participate in it. Using Jamglue.com even people with no musical experience can make simple remixes, record, upload, and share their own music.

http://www.jamglue.com