AWS Case Study: WeBuzz Limited

In just 3 simple steps, WeBuzz users can polish their own Facebook pages and make them stand out from millions of other pages. The application creation and installation processes involve no programming knowledge. Traditional made-to-order applications entail high service and production costs, but WeBuzz ready-to use applications make Facebook marketing affordable and effortless for all kinds of companies.

How have you incorporated Amazon Web Services as part of your architecture? What services are you using and how?
WeBuzz Limited is running the entire WeBuzz website and application on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

We have adopted a variety of infrastructure services, including:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2);
• Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB);
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Amazon ELB enables our application to handle both small and high numbers of visitors easily. Auto Scaling allows us to detect the traffic at the WeBuzz application and automatically launch more web servers to support high levels of traffic. We reduce costs by not having to deal with redundancy servers, and more importantly, we save time in not dealing with a normal web hosting company for expanding.

Why did you decide to use AWS?
We chose AWS because of the ease of setup and the pay-as-you-go model. It is convenient for us to manage all the servers easily. Also, the WeBuzz application interface supports more than 10 languages and serves a worldwide market. Therefore, a stable and secure infrastructure for handling heavy website data is crucial to WeBuzz's success. We can rely on AWS as a highly secure platform.

How has AWS helped your business?
Using AWS, we can avoid the trouble of managing a complex datacenter. The AWS setup process is very simple, which has greatly reduced our development time.

Auto Scaling and Amazon ELB are practical and helpful. They enable our applications to handle anything from one visitor to a million visitors easily. What impresses us most is that we only need to pay in proportion to the number of actual users. To us, AWS is an economical service which helps us save time, money, and human resources.

Can you share any metrics on your usage of AWS to date?
AWS helped us reduce our development cost and development time by 20-30 percent.

Have you learned any valuable lessons during this development process that you'd like to pass on to other developers?
We are running Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Lighttpd, Memcached, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon S3, and NFS separately on different servers. It is very challenging for us to backup all the servers into different Amazon Machine Image (AMI) instances so that they can be restored easily for any possible server error.Managing so many AMI instances is definitely not easy. AWS gave us the chance to learn how to develop a sophisticated backup solution.

Do you have any future plans to incorporate other AWS solutions?
We are planning to adopt Multi-Availability Zone (Multi-AZ) deployments, which will enhance our database availability and data durability. After launching a DB Instance with the Multi-AZ feature, Amazon RDS automatically detects failure and takes care of all of this for us, so that we can focus on our application and let AWS handle the 'troubles' for us.

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

Added July 1, 2011