AWS Case Study: R7

Edson Brandi, Technology Director of R7 notes that with millions of visitors, R7 required a heavy investment in infrastructure to guarantee a fast, high-quality viewing experience, especially during major events drawing heavy traffic, such as the Pan American Olympic Games.

“Amazon Web Services [AWS] fulfilled our needs with security, stability, agility, and flexibility,” says Edson Brandi. “The flexibility is due to autoscaling, which helps with our business dynamics. We pay only for what we use, so we reduced our infrastructure investments, yet are able to sustain seasonal and unexpected peaks.”
The R7 development team created a hybrid architecture with AWS and their existing datacenter. They used the following AWS products in their solution:

• Amazon CloudFront
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
• Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB)
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
• Linux and Windows instances
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)

The team used Python, PHP and Java to build the solution, as well as open source solutions like Varnish, nginx, Apache, MySQL, Chef, Git, and Zabbix. In building the solution, says Edson Brandi, “We changed some applications to be more fault-tolerant and to work more asynchronously. In this way we guaranteed scalability and better failure treatment.”

The team has been pleased with AWS. Edson Brandi says, “The use of AWS has significantly changed the way we work. Initially, we spent a few weeks doing extensive testing to know deeply how each component worked and how we could incorporate each one into our application architecture. At the beginning, we had concerns about adopting the cloud environment, but this changed when we used it in production for a few days. After that, it was clear that cloud adoption would save costs and give us better performance than the original scenario.” The team continues to use AWS products in their applications, especially new products.

To learn more, visit http://www.r7.com/ .

Added December 21, 2011