Dolphin Browser Case Study

2014

Dolphin Browser is a free mobile web browser developed by MoboTap, Inc. for Apple and Android Smartphones and tablets. The browser offers several unique features designed specifically for mobile environments including Dolphin Gesture, Dolphin Webzine and Dolphin Connect. Dolphin Gesture allows users to customize touch-based navigation such as drawing a heart to visit a dating website or a question mark to access a search engine. Dolphin Webzine displays individualized content in a magazine-style format, while Dolphin Connect syncs bookmarks between multiple Apple devices. In addition, the browser provides multi-touch zoom, tabbed browsing, push notifications, speed dial and over 50 add-ons for users to choose from.

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AWS enables us to really focus on our business plan, feature design, and code completion. It saves us plenty of time on hardware reservation, machine maintenance, dynamic scale out, and disaster recovery.”

Tiefeng Liu
CTO, MoboTap

The Challenge

When MoboTap began developing Dolphin in 2010, the company compared various cloud platforms, but could not find any that outperformed Amazon Web Services (AWS) features or customer support.

Yongzhi Yang, CEO of MoboTap explains, “AWS really helped us jumpstart Dolphin Browser. We were able to quickly build up and roll out multiple products and features that our customers like. In fact, we received over 200 emails per day with tons of product suggestions. Without AWS, there would have been no way for us to scale up this quickly to meet our growing customer needs.”

Why Amazon Web Services

MoboTap’s comprehensive infrastructure now includes Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon CloudWatch. This wide spectrum of services supports nearly all of Dolphin’s primary tasks and peripheral requirements, including the corporate website, backend operations, push notifications, Dolphin Gesture, Dolphin Webzine, and Dolphin Connect.

Currently, MoboTap is running over eighty different AWS instances—a number that increases every month with user demand. The built-in continuity between AWS products and services provides MoboTap with a unified system that requires very few administrative resources. “AWS enables us to really focus on our business plan, feature design, and code completion. It saves us plenty of time on hardware reservation, machine maintenance, dynamic scale out, and disaster recovery,” notes Tiefeng Liu, CTO of MoboTap.

MoboTap believes that one of the keys to their success as a start-up is that they designed their own applications to be scalable from the beginning and then, “let AWS handle the execution.” Tiefeng Liu goes on to say, “AWS is superb for developers to quickly experiment, verify ideas, and prove technical feasibility in an economic and efficient way.”

The Benefits

To maximize its cost-savings, MoboTap worked with AWS to learn how to leverage Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances and Consolidated Billing. The resulting financial benefit helps MoboTap promote Dolphin Browser’s rapid growth while also allocating valuable resources for future developments within the ever-expanding mobile market.

“Amazon’s solution is scalable enough to help us control budget and handle increasing users.” Yongzhi Yang, CEO of MoboTap concludes, “Amazon is essential to empower any mobile startup to compete with the big guys.”

MoboTap Builds on AWS for High Availability and Low Up Front Investment (4:44)

About Dolphin Browser

Dolphin Browser is a free mobile web browser developed by MoboTap, Inc. for Apple and Android Smartphones and tablets. 


AWS Services Used

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

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Amazon EMR

Amazon EMR is the industry leading cloud-native big data platform, allowing teams to process vast amounts of data quickly, and cost-effectively at scale.

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Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

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Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment.

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Amazon RDS

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.

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Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers.

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Amazon EBS

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is an easy to use, high performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for both throughput and transaction intensive workloads at any scale.

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