The GoAnimate team believes everyone has good stories to tell. However, for the majority, the tools available for expression are very limited. GoAnimate was created to provide an outlet for everyone's creativity and ideas. GoAnimate is a fun web application that lets users easily make cartoon animations, for free, in just 10 minutes, without having to draw. Users can even create their own cast of characters as shown in the picure below.
Prior to signing on with Amazon Web Services (AWS), GoAnimate rented dedicated servers. Alvin Hung, Founder and CEO of GoAnimate, says, “It was important to put our tech stack on a flexible and cost effective architecture. Combing the LAMP stack together with AWS proved to be the right choice. AWS has allowed us to focus our resources on our product, instead of managing a complex datacenter.”
The entire GoAnimate website is now on AWS. The team is using the following AWS Services:
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to host its webservers
- Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for its database
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon CloudFront to serve static content
- Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to help coordinate asynchronous jobs such as video encoding anf outbougn e-mail processing
“The ability to bring up and shut down instances easily has given us much more flexibility,” comments Hung. “For example, we sometimes bring up instances for testing before we release patches to our production servers. On the average, I believe AWS is reducing our development time by 20 to 30 percent.” Hung notes that GoAnimate has seen conversion rates go up since deploying their content on Amazon CloudFront.
The team is looking into using additional AWS services: Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon SimpleDB.
Hung says, “AWS is not just a web hosting service. AWS products work hand-in-hand to provide us a complete and cost-effective solution that increases our productivity and allows us to scale as fast as we want. It’s a joy to work with AWS because the pieces fit so well together; as a result, our development time is reduced.”
To learn more about how AWS can help your web application needs, visit our Web Applications details page: http://aws.amazon.com/web-mobile-social.