AWS Case Study: Tal.ki Forums Take to the Cloud

To deliver its services, Tal.ki initially used a major Internet service provider. Eventually, the company became frustrated with the amount of time it was spending on server maintenance and hardware issues. Vincent Lauria, Co-founder of Tal.ki, states, “As a small web startup, we wanted to focus our time on developing Web technologies, not supporting the hardware underneath it.” So, after examining multiple options, the company determined it would save significantly on monthly hosting by switching to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In addition to raw dollars saved, several factors influenced the decision. First, says Lauria, “We don’t have to deal with sales reps when we want to make changes.” Setting up a new instance now takes minutes rather than hours or days. Learning how easy it is to build and move instances also influenced the decision. Additionally, Tal.ki occasionally releases technology that has not been optimized for scaling; Lauria notes that with AWS, his team can “throw more hardware at it” to ensure they keep running. As Lauria explains, “AWS made it much easier for us to set up our staging servers for testing in different environments. It’s been a great environment to test new code before pushing it out live.”

Tal.ki is now running 100% on AWS. The company is running 10 instances, divided among Web servers, databases, load balancers, search indexing, staging, and other services specific to its environment. To interface with AWS, Tal.ki has implemented Boto, a Python library, and the company’s platform utilizes on such technologies as Linux, PostgreSQL, Python, Django, memcached, and Redis.

Lauria reports that by switching to AWS, the company’s monthly server and bandwidth costs have been cut by 25%. He adds, “The largest savings come from the fact that we can buy computing power on demand and don’t have to pay for resources we’re not using just to handle spikes.”

Since the move to AWS, Tal.ki has also taken advantage of the Amazon cloud to serve their static content, such as file attachments, style sheets, JavaScript code, and avatars. They are enjoying the new functionality AWS has added over the last couple of years and are looking forward to future developments. As Lauria says:

“We’ve grown quite a bit since 2007, and AWS has been an important part of that. Our development methods would not be as robust if it wasn’t for moving over to AWS. It’s changed our way of thinking for the better. We now have a more mature platform.”

http://tal.ki/