AWS Case Study: Knorex Pte. Ltd.

How have you incorporated Amazon Web Services as part of your architecture? What services are you using and how?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) forms a major channel for us to deliver our services to our customers and also for us to host our customers'/partners' services with us. We use a mixture of AWS server instances (reserved, on-demand, and spot-instances) with Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) to serve different levels of traffic and application requirements. For high traffic requirements, we use Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB).

Why did you decide to use AWS?
We had wonderful experiences using Amazon to purchase online items and wanted to explore AWS as our business platform to deliver great value to our customers. Once we got our hands dirty and started using AWS, it became clear that we should migrate our existing systems over to AWS as well as launch several new ones. AWS is, by far, the best-in-class provider/platform that offers unmatched flexibility, enabling us to serve a diverse group of customers with varying requirements. The comprehensive array of services along with a stable architecture provides confidence, both to us and our customers. Access to such an amazing infrastructure at a reasonable rate is a splendid gift from Amazon to the business world, especially to startups like us. We could not have grown at our current rate and possessed the kind of confidence needed to secure our customers had it not been for AWS.

How has AWS helped your business?
AWS provided us a quick, no-fuss way to immediately get our web applications deployed. The extensive online documentation helped us clearly understand what AWS can do for us. As a result, we are able to dynamically scale our business. Tapping into the expertise of AWS in handling both the hosting and management of our data centers has liberated us to focus on our core expertise.

With the stability and certainty offered by AWS, we can plan our expenses accordingly. Our business model operates with greater flexibility, enabling us to reach out to customers we might not have been able to secure otherwise. We have eliminated certain planned operating expenses including hardware, bandwidth, and labor costs since we began using AWS.

Can you share any metrics on your usage of AWS to date?
AWS enables our business in many different ways:

• Cost savings: We have significantly cut down on our operating costs and pass on huge savings to our customers. We measure this in terms of the cost of AWS servers versus the cost for in-house, physical servers.
• Efficiency: The developer-hours saved in term of setting up the infrastructure and managing the infrastructure is invaluable.
• Reduced Overhead: For testing and performance benchmarking, we can now easily tap into the various cost-effective features offered by AWS. This allows us to conduct our testing and performance benchmarking on the fly without the purchase of extra computers.
• Competitive Advantage: Our time-to-market has been greatly reduced giving us a competitive business advantage.
• Reputation: The uptime of AWS instills trust within our customers who rely on the consistent availability of our services.

Do you have any future plans to incorporate other AWS solutions?
As our business needs evolve, we will continue to explore new services from AWS. We are currently reading case studies published by Amazon (yet another great resource) and other experiential information provided by others, with the goal of reviewing some of our existing practices to see if we can further tweak our mix of technologies and use of AWS services.

Dealing with Amazon has left us with nothing but praise. We believe that our relationship with Amazon will continue to blossom over the years as we continue to enjoy what Amazon and its people have to offer.

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

Added August 15, 2011