AWS Case Study: Morph

When constructing Morph, the team considered legacy hosting providers such as RackSpace, Level3 and Teradata as well as investigated the possibility of building their own data center. But compared to the traditional options, they chose AWS. According to CEO, David Abramowski, “AWS services were the best match for us providing both on-demand compute power and on-demand storage.”

“We built our business from the ground up using Amazon’s technology. We were able to get started before we raised money as a business because there was no minimum commitment to get started with AWS. This gave us a huge advantage to those other companies that have to invest in hardware just to get the prototype up and running.”

Using Morph’s interface, developers don’t have to figure out how to build a server, add stacks of software, configure the software, manage the servers, setup load balancers or deal with virtual data center routing issues. In addition to the features of AWS, the Morph AppSpace subscriptions implement multiple layers of technology to enjoy a fault tolerant environment with distributed processing that minimize disruptions of any single failure.

“We use Amazon EC2 compute instances to form our end to end system. This includes our load balancing systems, web delivery platforms, monitoring systems, and database systems. We also have command and control nodes that watch for problems inside of our system and can re-start or auto-repair certain conditions. We also allow our customers to shrink or grow their compute requirements with the click of a button. The complexities of servers, operating systems and clustering are a thing of the past. Our service simplifies the developer experience into a web based administrators panel.”

“We use Amazon S3 to provide near real time backups of our database servers as well as store our system images and application deployment packages. We use SQS to decouple our data and performance collection systems from our database systems, feeding into the queues raw data in one side, and consuming it and inserting into databases on the other side. We use the Elastic IP Addresses to ensure availability of mail and DNS services.”

“Web applications are strange animals. Some days they are meager and other days they are ferocious. Amazon Web Services have allowed Morph to build a system that can take advantage of “on the fly” computing power to reduce the friction of scaling a web application in a nearly hands-free environment. We feel this is an advantage we could only gain through cloud computing.”

“AWS provides Morph Labs with flexibility and speed. It allows us to think of new ways of providing our services that are not bounded by physical data centers or capital expense budgets.”

http://www.mor.ph