Develop and Scale Facebook Apps with AWS

From the lone developer creating a successful app in their garage, to large social gaming organizations like Zynga, Wooga, and Playfish, 70% of the top 50 Facebook apps are powered by one or more AWS services. AWS enables developers to bring Facebook apps to market quickly and scale effortlessly to serve millions of customers as their Facebook app grows in popularity and demand.

Whether you are looking to build a large-scale social app, a game, or a social business app, AWS has a broad set of scalable cloud computing services to power your project:

• Compute: Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows developers to obtain and configure virtual server capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with root-level control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change.
• Database: AWS provides a number of database options for developers: Amazon RDS enables you to run a fully featured MySQL or Oracle relational database with automatic database administration; Amazon SimpleDB provides a simple key-value store database with seamless scalability; and using one of our many relational and noSQL database AMIs on Amazon EC2 you can also operate the database of your choice in the AWS cloud such as MongoDB, postgreSQL, Cassandra, and many others.
• Storage: Amazon S3 provides a highly durable storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. This service is ideal for storing Facebook application files such as photos, videos, audio files, etc.
• Content Delivery Network: Amazon CloudFront is an easy-to-use, globally distributed content delivery service that delivers static and streaming content. It was created to work seamlessly with Amazon S3 or with your own file source. With edge locations throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia, your content will be readily accessible to your global customers, with the reliability of Amazon’s global infrastructure.

Scalability

With AWS, you have access to Amazon’s massive infrastructure – you can use the resources you need to scale your application up or down based on demand. Because social applications are characterized by highly-unpredictable growth and spikes of daily traffic from their users, previous methods of datacenter provisioning is often inadequate to meet the new patterns of consumer demand. With the AWS Autoscaling capability, Amazon EC2 resources can be dynamically added (or removed) based on a series of triggers, such as the amount of traffic an application receives. This allows developers to ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances increases seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance, and decreases automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. Auto Scaling is particularly well suited for Facebook applications, which often experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage.

Cost-Effectiveness

AWS customers pay only for the compute power, storage, and other resources they use. There are no long-term contracts or up-front commitments. For more information on comparing the costs of other hosting alternatives with AWS, see the AWS Economics Center.

Customization & Flexibility

AWS enables you to select the operating system, programming language, web application platform, database, and other services you need. With AWS, you receive a virtual environment that lets you load the software and services your application requires. This eases the migration process for existing applications while preserving options for building new solutions. Once your application is up and running on AWS, our CloudFormation service offers developers and systems administrators an easy way to create a collection of related AWS resources and provision them in an orderly and predictable fashion.

Resource Management & Monitoring

AWS enables organizations to manage thousand of compute nodes with a small team of system administrators by eliminating tasks around provisioning, setting up & maintaining networking, resolving hardware failure, etc.

In addition, Amazon CloudWatch provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources and applications.. Developers and system administrators can use it to collect and track metrics, gain insight, and react immediately to keep their applications and businesses running smoothly. With Amazon CloudWatch, there is system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health.

Consulting & Support

AWS is dedicated to ensuring that all our customers can quickly and successfully deploy applications onto the AWS cloud. We work with a wide range of professional services firms (including system integrators, agencies, and consultancies) to successfully deliver and operate cloud- based solutions built on AWS. Areas we can provide assistance with include: business & IT strategy, solution architecting, application delivery, application migration, managed services, and training.

To support our customers in day-to-day operations, AWS also offers AWS Premium Support plans. All AWS Premium Support plans offer customers an unlimited number of support cases with pay-by-the-month pricing and no long-term contracts. Our four plan choices provide developers and businesses the flexibility to choose the support plans that meet their specific needs.

Security

AWS utilizes an end-to-end approach to secure and harden our infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures. For more information, see the AWS Security Center.

Get Started Today

If you are new to AWS, we invite you to take a look at how a sample Facebook app can be launched using one of our pre-built infrastructure templates. If your AWS account was created after November 2010, all the resources consumed by this sample application will fall within the limits of the AWS Free Usage Tier.

As you learn more about AWS, you can always edit these sample deployments and customize them to the needs of your application.

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