AWS Case Study: Mimesis Republic
Charles-Christian Croix, Technical Exploitation Manager, at Mimesis Republic Designs, explains how the company is using several solutions from AWS to host its 3D virtual world, Mamba Nation:
Hi Charles, briefly tell us about your business.
Hi Charles, briefly tell us about your business.
Mimesis Republic is a French technology company founded by Nicolas Gaume and Sébastian Lombardo in 2007 and based in Paris and Bordeaux.
We specialize in several multi-media technologies including social networks, Internet, and video games. Our current efforts are focused on Mamba Nation, the next generation 3D virtual world for teenagers and young adults. Mamba Nation is a blend of social games, a virtual universe, and social networks. It's fully integrated into the Facebook environment.
Our role as the Mimesis Infrastructure Team is to provide a professional hosting solution that is scalable for a large audience.
How have you incorporated Amazon Web Services as part of your architecture? What services are you using and how?
Our Infrastructure Team tested Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a development platform and for small projects. After a period of training, we migrated a portion of our production platform to AWS. Currently, we're using the following services: Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon CloudWatch.
We also use the AWS Java SDK. Our tools are coded in Scala and interact with Chef and Capistrano.
Because Mamba Nation is still in open beta phase, the architecture is not finalized and is still changing. We currently have 452,322 members and growing.
Why did you decide to use AWS?
Amazon Web Services is the leader in cloud computing. With AWS, it's easy for a System Administrator to get started. AWS has detailed online documentation, how-to articles, and case studies readily available to help anyone get started on the cloud. It's also easy to run a trial of the service on a test-basis for a low cost.
How has AWS helped your business?
The biggest benefit for Mamba Nation is the elastic aspect of AWS. It’s possible to try an architecture configuration or faster repartition for a lower cost. With AWS, you can move from idea to proof of concept ten times a week.
Can you share any metrics on your usage of AWS to date?
We use about 50 Amazon EC2 instances and are still in the development and testing phase. We believe that we have cut testing time by 70% because we are using AWS.
Currently, we have 10 production platforms in which 8 platforms are dedicated exclusively to research and development. We primarily use Amazon EC2 for Java virtual machine (JVM) hosting, conventional web services (Apache and PHP) and NoSQL database (MongoDB). We mainly use an m1.large instance because it offers the memory and CPU power that meets our needs. We are testing many new instances of the c1.medium instance that will likely become the foundation of our architecture in the future.
Have you learned any valuable lessons during this development process that you’d like to pass on to other developers?
Two important pieces of advice we'd share are:
- Think of security before any other part of your project. Always remember that, while EC2 network access is locked down by default, when you launch an Amazon EC2 instance you are a few mouse clicks or one API call away from having your instances live on the open Internet.
- Never forget to build an architecture that has data duplication, failover, and backup as an extra layer of protection in the cloud. AWS was key to this aspect of our strategy.
To learn more, visit http://mimesis-republic.com/ 
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Added May 29, 2012
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