AWS Case Study: Zoomii

Zoomii introduces a new way of shopping online. It’s a dynamic, visual, zoomable, online bookstore that mimics the shelves of a brick-and-mortar bookstore. Book covers, organized by category, can be searched or scrolled in a convenient, highly visual format. Just like getting “lost” in a bookstore for hours, you can easily get pleasantly “lost” in Zoomii.

Who created this? The company’s founder and sole employee, Chris Thiessen. With nothing but an idea of what he wanted to create, Thiessen turned to Amazon Web Services for the rest. Zoomii pulls book images and product details from Amazon using the Product Advertising API, uses Amazon EC2 for all hosting and Amazon S3 for data storage and replication.

“There’s no real alternative I’ve seen with the openness, scalability, and incremental billing of Amazon Web Services. Zoomii was done on a shoe-string budget, something I don’t think could have happened without AWS. Of course, that’s just for the technology part,” states Thiessen. “The store itself would have likely been impossible without the book information provided by the Product Advertising API.”

“When we launched, Zoomii had about 150,000 people during the first few weeks. Using Amazon EC2, I could manage the servers remotely and scale up or down as needed. The flexibility is truly amazing,” added Thiessen. He also sold more than 650 books in those first few weeks which he earned commission on from Associates, Amazon’s affiliate marketing program.

Designing and building Zoomii took about 18 months. The hardest part was designing for scale, since Zoomii is so computationally and bandwidth-intensive. “I learned a lot while building Zoomii, from the ground up on AWS. The biggest lesson learned was to plan for failure, and take central monitoring of your system seriously—it’s hard to fix problems when you don’t know they’re occurring. For example, since the services rarely fail, error-handling logic is rarely tested.”

For more on Zoomii, go to http://zoomii.com/ This link will launch in a new browser window or tab.