AWS Case Study: Jitscale

The Jitscale team uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), and Amazon CloudFront and plan to support even more Amazon features, such as Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, in the near future.

Jitscale backups and log files are written to Amazon S3, and Amazon CloudFront is used for all static data, including JavaScript scripts, images, and documents. This configuration allows the Jitscale team to serve only HTML text from individual instances, resulting in extremely fast sites.

The Jitscale team used Ruby on Rails to build a management solution, interacting with Amazon Web Services (AWS) through the Ruby gem right_aws and adding features for automatic application deployment, scaling, and monitoring. The team used collectd for monitoring, which allowed them to gather health information on all instances launched into the Jitscale portal and send SMS/Jabber alerts on the gathered information. They used Puppet to configure all instances launched. Puppet configuration files were hosted on their redundant administration servers, which also run the Jitscale portal.

Paul Brinkhof of Clubs.nl, one of Jitscale’s clients, is very pleased with Jitscale’s use of AWS. In late 2008, ownership of Clubs.nl was moved from KPN to Clubs Social Media BV. Since early December 2009, Clubs.nl has used Jitscale to host its brand new platform, sporting a new design and new functionality. All clubs and users were migrated from the existing infrastructure, so the challenge was to allow a huge and impatient group of users to immediately improve their clubs.

As traffic on Clubs.nl sites showed large peaks, automatically scaling the platform to meet demand was essential, not only ensuring excellent user experience but also decreasing infrastructure costs. AWS offered the best solution for this specific situation. According to Clubs.nl, performance of the Clubs.nl Web site increased by 56 percent, while the cost of the infrastructure decreased by 18 percent and the site’s uptime is 99.991 percent.

Paul Brinkhof’s team migrated their servers with record speed from physical hardware in a data center to the Amazon cloud. “I already relied upon Jitscale’s systems administration expertise,” says Brinkhof. “Their combination of this expertise and [Amazon Web Services’] flexible infrastructure inspired me to migrate my platform.”

The Brinkhof team is especially happy to no longer have a capacity limit. “This is the most important thing to us, as we have a lot of peaks in visitor numbers to our Clubs.nl sites,” says Brinkhof.

Next to that, Brinkhof cites the ability to instantly duplicate a complete (test) environment. “I can use this environment as long or as short as I like,” says Brinkhof, noting that when employing physical hardware, “sooner or later— sometimes multiple times a day—you’ll be running into maximum capacity limits, which often can be tough to predict.” Upon launch, for example, Clubs.nl required five times the number of application servers the Jitscale team currently uses.

”It’s also a comforting thought that I won’t be paying for excess capacity, since I only pay for extra scaled servers if they are needed,” adds Brinkhof. “Data costs are 10 times lower with Jitscale using AWS than if I’d taken up just any offer that initially came my way.”

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