Yo Case Study

Yo is a social messaging mobile application built for iOS, Android, and Windows phones. The application allows users to send messages with a simple “yo” or short links and attachments added to them. After its launch in the summer of 2014, Yo became one of the most popular mobile applications by adding 1 million users in 4 days.

• The company built its mobile application backend on a third-party provider’s platform.
• Needed to build a scalable mobile application backend that would support the company as it continued to grow and deliver hundreds of thousands of messages to its users.

• Migrated its mobile application backend to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• Yo uses Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to send hundred of thousands of notifications everyday when users exchange messages from the application.
• The company also uses Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (Amazon EMR) to process usage data, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to power utility services, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store data.

• Reliability: Using AWS services, Yo designed its mobile backend architecture to support its applications and users more reliably.
• Scale: Yo can provision the necessary IT resources it needs at any time, anywhere in the world to support its growth in users.
• Flexibility: Gained more control over its backend configurability. As the company grows, it can better configure its backend services to minimize downtime and improve overall user experience.