Flipboard Case Study

2014

Flipboard, located in Palo Alto, CA, is one of the world's first social magazines. Inspired by the beauty and ease of print media, the company’s mission is to fundamentally improve how people discover, view, and share content across their social networks.

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We were able to go from concept to delivered product in approximately six months with just a handful of engineers, in large part because of the ability to deploy within a working cloud infrastructure very quickly.”

Greg Scallan
Chief architect, Flipboard

The Challenge

From the beginning, Flipboard has run its infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Greg Scallan, Chief Architect at Flipboard says, “Our service currently runs 100% on AWS in multiple availability zones.” He adds, “We chose AWS because they were able to provide a majority of the solution we needed as we built our data center. Also, we appreciated the flexibility as we tried out various solutions to our business vision.”

Why Amazon Web Services

Why Amazon Web Services

Flipboard has incorporated AWS services as follows:

To build their solution, the team used Python/Ruby AWS SDKs in their operational tools and administrative servers. Scallan explains, “We leverage the Java AWS SDKs for core engineering services. We utilize many different languages, choosing the language that best meets the requirements at hand.”

The Benefits

Flipboard has many hundreds of Amazon EC2 instances running and that number is continually growing with their increasing user base and feature sets. Scallan says, “We were able to go from concept to delivered product in approximately six months with just a handful of engineers, in large part because of the ability to deploy within a working cloud infrastructure very quickly.”

The Flipboard team is always investigating additional AWS solutions and is open to using additional products as their needs evolve.

The team has most appreciated the flexibility AWS has offered for prototyping before their first release. Scallan says, “This truly helped us release a working product on a highly aggressive schedule in a market with many emerging players.”

Flipboard Grows its Reader Base while Reducing IT Expenditure (7:54)

About Flipboard

Flipboard, located in Palo Alto, CA, is one of the world's first social magazines. Inspired by the beauty and ease of print media, the company’s mission is to fundamentally improve how people discover, view, and share content across their social networks.


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 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 SimpleDB

Amazon SimpleDB is a highly available NoSQL data store that offloads the work of database administration.

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Amazon ELB

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions.

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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 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 SQS

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.

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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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