AWS Case Study: TalkBox Limited

Hi Gilman, briefly tell us about your business.
TalkBox Limited is one of the few early stage technology start-ups founded in Hong Kong. With a team of 20 people in both our development and marketing units, we are the creators of a multi-platform mobile application called TalkBox Voice Messenger. The TalkBox platform is now serving over 6 million registered users worldwide with a 48% rate of weekly active usage.

How have you incorporated Amazon Web Services as part of your architecture? What services are you using and how?
We are currently using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB), and Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES).

Amazon EC2 and Amazon ELB:TalkBox is now serving more than 6 million users and transmitting more than 100 million messages each day. Sudden high traffic is a big concern for our backend server. However, the Amazon ELB console with Amazon EC2 enable us to increase server capacity within minutes, which provides us much more flexibility to scale our servers up depending on our needs in order to handle periods of high traffic.

Amazon S3:TalkBox also brings in social networking elements into the voice messaging experience. Users can post voice tweets and Facebook voice posts via TalkBox agents by generating an external URL link for users. Amazon S3 comes into play here to help us generate specific URL's for accessing the corresponding sound files.

Amazon SES: TalkBox is growing rapidly, averaging approximately 10,000 new users each day. For each new user, TalkBox sends a thank-you email with an update reminder and new feature highlights. With highly unpredictable registration requests from all over the world, a reliable and scalable email service is critical for TalkBox to continue developing high quality customer engagement for a relatively large audience. Amazon SES provides high availability and deliverability. With Amazon SES, not only do our emails arrive at the intended destination, but we also have great flexibility to scale up the capacity based on our needs.

Why did you decide to use AWS?
Because we are developing an application with highly unpredictable traffic, it is almost impossible for us to predict the user growth on our platform. We needed a cloud solution flexible enough to handle our unpredictable growth as well as a reliable web service provider. AWS was the clear choice for us, and we have been using it since day one.

How has AWS helped your business?
The all in one solution from AWS provides us with an integrated web service solution with high stability and excellent technical support. AWS provides almost all the components we need to build, test, and deploy our service platform. It’s convenient, cost effective, and most importantly, reliable.

“If you are looking for an all in one web service solution, Amazon is the choice.”

Can you share any metrics on your usage of AWS to date?
Simply by using Amazon EC2, we saw a 53% cost savings. Amazon S3 enables highly scalable and inexpensive storage which helps us reduce man hours by about 30%.

To learn more, visit http://talkboxapp.com .

Added January 12,, 2012