AWS Case Study: Outback Steakhouse and Engauge

Outback utilized multiple AWS services to meet the needs of this campaign including:

• Networking: Amazon Route 53 and Elastic Load Balancing
• Computing: Amazon EC2
• Database: Amazon RDS
• Content Delivery: Amazon CloudFront
• Storage: Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS
• Monitoring: Amazon CloudWatch

The custom application was primarily written in PHP, a highly popular server side scripting language that is optimized for rapid web application development. Outback and Engauge leveraged the EC2 API for auto-scaling and the RDS Multi-AZ feature to ensure high availability for its databases.

Outback chose AWS and Amazon RDS to manage this time critical and large scale project for five main reasons:

1. Time to Market: By utilizing Amazon Web Services, Outback and Engauge met an aggressive timeline by building and deploying an enterprise solution in weeks on temporary infrastructure without requiring Outback to make a significant capital investment.
2. Capabilities of the AWS platform: The multiple integrated services offered on the AWS platform eliminated the need for Outback and Engauge to procure and set up web services from multiple 3rd party vendors required for the campaign.
3. Ease of use: Amazon RDS simplifies and automates complex database administration tasks like backups, horizontal scaling (through Read Replicas), vertical scaling (by upgrading instance type), and high availability replication– allowing developers such as Engauge to focus on the application logic.
4. Scalability: Amazon RDS provides cost efficient and resizable capacity, allowing Outback to scale their database to handle the massive number of requests expected in this flash campaign.
5. Support: Amazon Premium Support allowed Outback and Engauge to tap into the experience of the AWS Solution Architects and the Amazon RDS engineering team to optimize the application to ensure high performance throughput both prior to and during the campaign.

The application was powered by 500+ EC2 instances and 2 quadruple extra large RDS instances, running in the Multi-AZ mode. During the promotion, the application flawlessly handled a considerable peak of 250,000 requests per minute.

“Outback was thrilled with the performance of how this was set up” said Michael Kappitt, CMO for Outback Steakhouse. “The collaboration between Engauge, AWS, and our other agency partners to pull this off was tremendous and was key to the launch of our 1 million steak giveway. The systems and processes that AWS and Engauge provided allowed us to create and launch this campaign in a matter of weeks.”

“The AWS platform is very much a Batman’s utility belt, given the breadth of services available on AWS,” said VP of Technology for Engauge, Tomer Tishgarten. “As an AWS Systems Integration Partner, we understood that the key to “flash” campaigns was ensuring that the databases could scale to handle the traffic bursts and they did. The consultation with the Amazon RDS team was invaluable as we leveraged their experience to fine-tune our systems and run a successful campaign on behalf of Outback Steakhouse.”

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

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

Added February 9, 2012