AWS Case Study: Virada Cultural

Currently, there are millions of users running GeneXus-generated applications in more than 45 countries. Headquartered in Uruguay, GeneXus has branches in Brazil, Mexico, Japan, and USA, as well as official distributors in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Why did you decide to use AWS?

Each year, the city of São Paulo hosts the mega-show Virada Cultural which brings together over 4 million people in the city's center. Virada Cultural features many artists who perform on over 1200 stages during the two-day event. A few weeks before the event, GeneXus was presented with the opportunity to develop a mobile application for the event, both for Android devices and for iOS devices. The project offered a huge opportunity for our company, but it also presented us with an extremely challenging time-frame.

We needed to be sure that we could handle any volume of mobile users requesting information about the event—all at the same time. We chose AWS due to its great flexibility, low costs, and low latency infrastructure with its South America (Sao Paolo) Region in Brazil. AWS is simply unmatched.

How have you incorporated Amazon Web Services as part of your architecture? What services are you using and how?

For the Virada Cultural mobile application, we ended up using Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS to handle the concurrent use of the applications by a potentially massive volume of users. In particular, we used m1.xlarge instances for the application (Linux, Apache, Tomcat and Java) and RDS db.m1.large MySQL instances for the database.

We also used GeneXus X Evolution 2, generating apps for Java. GeneXus is a software development tool that creates 100% of the application in the chosen language automatically. In this particular case, we chose to generate the data layer in Amazon RDS (mySQL), the data access layer with JSON, and the layout in Objective-C for iOS and Java for Android. Both the data access and the communication between layers are automatically managed by GeneXus. With GeneXus X Evolution 2, we integrated a “one-click deployment to the cloud” function that gives users the power to simply leverage the cloud’s flexibility for their applications.

The following diagram illustrates the architecture:

How has AWS helped your business?

Quick scalability. Low Costs. Better Performance.

By using GeneXus and AWS, we were able to have an application running for both iOS and Android in less than a few days. In fact, graphic design tweaks took more time than we needed for development and production staging. All in all, it took less than one week to fully develop each app.

The flexibility of AWS, combined with the simplicity of “in-the-cloud” prototyping capabilities from GeneXus, gave the Virada Cultural project a great time-to-market.

Have you learned any valuable lessons during this development process that you’d like to pass on to other developers?

If not for Amazon Web Services, it would have been impossible to handle the 6,000,000 requests we received in such a short time period at such a reasonable price.

Do you have any future plans to incorporate other AWS solutions?

Definitely! We are going to continue improving cloud services integration for applications developed with GeneXus. We are also working on providing tools for developing systems and helping companies migrate their critical applications seamlessly into the AWS cloud.

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

Added June 19, 2012