AWS Case Study: nuTsie

Please tell us about your company and your role.

Bob Wise, VP Engineering, Melodeo. Inc. I run engineering and operations for Melodeo, Inc. Our main product group is iPhone apps (we have over thirty music apps), our nuTsie music clients for mobile phones, and our music destination website www.nutsie.com. Across all our mobile apps, we recently crossed the 1 million client download mark and nutsie.com serves over 2 million visits per month.

Why did you choose Amazon Web Services to power your iPhone app?

We power all of our applications, including our iPhone apps using AWS. We are heavy users of S3, which we use as a very cost-effective CDN for streaming music to our iPhone clients. We started small with AWS last year, and early this year we migrated entirely to AWS as we saw great stability and the opportunity to save considerable operational cost.

How have you incorporated AWS as part of your architecture? What services are you using and how?

We are heavy users of S3 and EC2. We run our MySQL databases on a small number of x-large instances, we run our web and mobile servers on a number of large instances, and run memcache on a number of small instances. Overall we use around 40 EC2 instances. We are also using SimpleDB to offload our MySQL databases, and have been developing additional services using SQS. We are using the AWS load balancer as well.

How has AWS helped you succeed?

We’ve saved considerable money, but beyond that our service reliability has improved. Our ability to add capacity more incrementally and to accommodate bursty traffic is a huge advantage.

Do you have any metrics you can release about how much money you have saved by using AWS?

We estimate we have saved 30-40% of our hosting costs.

Thank you for taking the time to tell us about your iPhone app. Is there anything else you would like to add?

Our most popular iphone app is Top 100s by Year, and is usually to be found in the top 10 paid music apps in the app store. Give it a try!

To learn more about nuTsie, visit www.nutsie.com/ .