AWS Case Study: ZAGG, Inc. and 8KMiles

The Business Challenges

ZAGG’s products are sold through authorized retailers, a mall cart program, and online affiliates. In addition, the company’s own ecommerce site generates over $30 million in revenue. To handle this heavy sales traffic, ZAGG needed a web infrastructure that would promote both availability and scalability.

In addition, ZAGG wanted to find a versatile environment that would support the open source LAMP web server stack. Mike Dennison, the company’s System Administrator, explains, “ZAGG, Inc. is very careful to be as cost-effective as possible to enhance shareholder value, while at the same time providing a powerful, efficient, scalable, and fault tolerant systems architecture.”

Why Amazon Web Services

To meet these stringent economic and technical requirements, ZAGG turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AWS Solution Provider 8KMiles. Within two months, the company established its site using the LAMP stack on an Amazon Linux AMI in Amazon EC2. The infrastructure also includes a wide assortment of additional AWS features, including Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling for Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, and Amazon RDS with Multi-AZ deployment and Read Replicas. Amazon Route 53 provides Domain Name System services, while Amazon CloudFront and Amazon SES carry out content delivery and email distribution.

Since launching the reconfigured ecommerce site, ZAGG continues to initiate enhancements and explore AWS features. “We have been adding services and enhancing our solution continuously. AWS makes scaling our site with infinite capacity easy by using their integrated management console. We decided to engage with 8KMiles and have them design and recommend highly scalable solutions using many Amazon Web Services offerings. 8KMiles has always been fast, professional, and they have highly skilled staff that is able to provide the best solution to any problem,” says Dennison.

The entire system, which is monitored with Amazon CloudWatch, is highlighted in the diagram below:

The Business Benefits

With its track record of industry-leading innovations and steady growth, ZAGG continues to capture the attention of consumers and investors alike. Mike Dennison encourages other businesses to utilize AWS to create their own successful ecommerce platforms. Dennison says, “When designing a website for the cloud, try to compartmentalize the services and assets so they can be distributed on different services, such as Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, and Auto Scaling.”

For more information about ZAGG, visit zagg.com .

For more information about 8KMiles, visit 8kmiles.com .

Added May 8, 2012