AWS Case Study: ParkVu
We recently talked to Jeff Fedor and Terry Goertz, Co-Founders of ParkVu and they described their mobile application running on AWS.
Please describe your company.
Smartphones are increasingly becoming excellent media players, but the problem is that your media isn’t mobile. People have instant and always up-to-date access to their email, contacts, and calendars but when it comes synchronizing media they have to plug in. ParkVu’s WithMe family of products gives you the same freedom for your music, pictures, video, and documents that you come to expect for email, contacts, and calendars.
How have you incorporated Amazon Web Services as part of your infrastructure? What services are you using and how?
We are using the following services…SQS for client/server communication, we needed something to support communication for connected devices. Amazon SimpleDB for transactional store and guaranteed delivery (with our library). S3 for our media repository. EC2 for compute, we use it to host our services.
Why did you choose AWS to power your mobile application?
We were 2 people launching a global scale application for a self-funded company and we needed on-demand scaling with no capex. We couldn’t do it any other way.
How has AWS helped you succeed?
Because of the combination of AWS Services we have “built-in” redundancy, failover and infinite scale. Because we use SQS and SimpleDB we can introduce additional EC2 instances at any point for additional scale. Our architecture is completely stateless so each EC2 instance can operate in isolation, on discrete workitems. To use a simple example of provisioning a new user, multiple EC2 instances can operate on parts of the transaction for a better user experience for our subscribers. The combination of our libraries and Amazon Web Services has enabled us to quickly launch new features.
Do you have any quantifiable details about the success of your business or how much money you’ve saved going with AWS?
After launching, we’ve become a top app on BlackBerry App World and we have no IT or network operations staff. So that is a huge savings for us.
With SimpleDB, we’re not running multiple SQL instances with Master-Slave configs for failover and backup so that savings alone is at least a couple of hundred dollars/month.
Do you have any future plans to incorporate other AWS solutions or use these services in other ways?
Amazon Flexible Payments for app upgrades, DevPay to launch a true utility-based service offering, and Cloudfront as our CDN.
To learn more about ParkVu, visit www.parkvu.com/ 
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(Published October 2009)
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