AWS Case Study: Urbanspoon

How have you incorporated Amazon Web Services as part of your architecture? What services are you using and how?
We use Amazon S3 to store photos, including user profile photos and meal snapshots. We use Amazon CloudFront for our static assets. We also use EC2 for testing.

Why did you choose AWS?
Performance, price, reliability and API maturity.

How has AWS helped your business?
It took less than a week to implement Amazon S3. If we’d stuck with our naïve photo store, our database would currently be 25 times it’s current size. CloudFront took a day or two to implement. Switching to CloudFront helped us stay within our bandwidth caps, which saves us several thousand dollars a month. AWS plays a crucial role at Urbanspoon, improving our performance while keeping our operational costs shockingly low.

Do you have any future plans to incorporate other AWS solutions?
We’d love to use S3 for video storage. I’d also like to find a way to move more of our assets into CloudFront, like stylesheets and javascript.

Have you learned any valuable lessons during this development process that you’d like to pass on to other developers?
Let Amazon’s crack team do the hard work for you, especially if ops isn’t your specialty!

Is there anything else you would like to add?
Thanks for providing such great products.

To learn more about Urbanspoon, visit urbanspoon.com .