AWS Case Study: Soundtrckr

Soundtrckr is the first geosocial Internet radio, with 8 million songs available to users to create radio stations that are easily shared on social media applications. Users can search for and tune into stations created by other users nearby, play what’s hot around the city, connect with venues to share the music they play, and check out what other people are playing. The Soundtrckr Website, conceived for touch and Internet connected devices, is a full HTML5 music streaming service, compatible with a wide variety of devices. The company has locations in Washington DC and San Francisco.

With the exception of some basic services like Domain Name Services (DNS) and company email, Soundtrckr’s entire production and development infrastructure is hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services) resources. According to Daniele Calabrese, Founder and CEO at Soundtrckr, the company’s original goals with the migration to AWS were:

1. Separate application and database servers so that the service could scale properly
2. Scale server instances to provide high performance database access
3. Achieve consistent, automatic database backups
4. Provide quick migration of either database or application servers as the service scaled

Through the development process, the team has learned that “migrating services to AWS instances is easy,” says Calabrese. “However,” he adds, “ensuring that your architecture is designed to make the best use of all the features available and get every ounce of performance out of your instances takes careful planning and performance analysis.”

Currently, the company is using AWS services as follows:

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) — Used for AMI storage, caching application image data, and Website image distribution
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) — Instances with multiple regions and zones provide all infrastructure services, including database servers, Tomcat application servers, and mobile API services for both production and development environments
• Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) — Used for AMIs, striped volumes for database performance, snapshots for production backups, and fail over
• Amazon CloudWatch — Used to monitor the health of the pool of production resources
• Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB) — Used to balance traffic between front-end instances, and to balance the load among Web and mobile application servers
• Amazon CloudFront — Used for distributing the Amazon S3 data to nodes closest to mobile users

The following diagram illustrates Soundtrckr’s topology:

Various integration pieces are built utilizing shell code and Amazon’s Python-based Amazon EC2 libraries. Soundtrckr’s Java code utilizes JetS3t to interact with Amazon S3.

The company is currently running fifteen instances, including those for their development environment. Calabrese explains that, “the B2B service for the music is limited to known IP addresses, which affects our ability to dynamically scale at the moment. However, based on usage patterns and planned product launches, we have scaled the production instances to as many as twelve. AWS support engineers have been extremely responsive working with our team to get us additional resources when we need them.”

Soundtrckr plans to leverage multiple AWS regions to bring their services closer to their international users. Their goal is to create a robust database infrastructure with replication between zones and multiple read-only replicas for maximizing application throughput. He adds “We hope that new Route 53 service will be another tool we can leverage to improve Soundtrckr for our users.” In the company’s quest to maximize their effectiveness in the cloud, they look forward to enjoying the evolution of the AWS platform and its myriad of services. “AWS has enabled Soundtrckr to perform nimble development without big time expenses,” says Calabrese, “it is allowing our service to scale quickly, effectively, and seamlessly.”

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