AWS Case Study: LogicStyle

How have you incorporated Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of your architecture? What services are you using, and how?
We use AWS in our internal systems and also advise customers in deploying architectures based on AWS services. Our customers use Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS and Amazon S3 in order to implement the most critical parts of their architecture.

What programming languages and/or tools did you use to build this solution? Did you use any AWS SDKs?
In the process of using AWS Services we felt like we needed better command-line tools. We then developed Rain Toolkit , an open source set of sysadmin-friendly command line tools for Amazon EC2 Administration. This solution is based on the AWS Java SDK.

Why did you decide to use AWS? What caused you to look to AWS, and choose it?
The main reasons for choosing and recommending AWS were elasticity and cost. The AWS solution is more cost-effective for our customers and us than maintaining our own physical servers and data centers. The elasticity aspect is also very important for a consulting company like ours: we can provision entire software stacks on demand in very little time with a low cost. This enables us to have lots of environments for each customer (Development, QA, preproduction, production), which would be difficult to do in other environments.

Can you provide any quantifiable metrics related to your use of AWS?
Our customers that migrate to AWS from a in-house solution report on average a 50% reduction in TCO. This reduction comes in direct cost savings related to server capacity and bandwidth and from indirect savings related to a reduction in man-hours spent in managing the environments, and in most cases a reduction of unplanned downtime.

Have you learned any valuable lessons during the migration/development on AWS that you’d like to pass on to other technical decision makers?
The Cloud environment is different from the traditional application hosting environment because the Cloud is more dynamic: each component of your software stack can come and go as needed. So in order to maximize your efficiency in the Cloud you must evolve your Architecture to incorporate the dynamic provisioning aspects offered by cloud environments.

Can you give me a quote about what do you like most about AWS or how it helped your business?
AWS has enabled our customers and us to produce software that is better, faster and more reliable.

Do you, or do other teams within the company, have future plans to incorporate other AWS solutions?
We are always evaluating he AWS service portfolio in order to better understand how to take advantage of the ever-increasing number of available AWS solutions. We are currently evaluating the best way to leverage the AWS Cloud to run Java EE 6 applications.

To learn more, visit http://logicstyle.com/ .

Added March 15, 2012