Founded in April 2015, SHAREit Technologies Co., Ltd. is a global technology company focused on the R&D of mobile Internet software and mainly offers SHAREit, CLONEit, CLEANit, and other products. As a core product, SHAREit, is a cross-platform sharing app enabling wireless transfer of files between devices without consuming data traffic. After a successful transition to SHAREit 4.0, it provides users with an entire entertainment ecosystem including short videos, movies, music, funny pictures, and others. The one-stop services platform allows users to browse, download, and transfer contents at SHAREit with ease.
SHAREit currently provides 39 language versions and has 1.5 billion users around the world, over 500 million of them come from India and Indonesia. It has become a “Nationally favored App” in some of the world’s emerging markets such as India, Indonesia, the Middle East, and the South Africa etc. The data from App Annie shows that, as of March 27, 2018, SHAREit ranked first in the tool list of Google Play Store in 39 countries and App Store’s efficiency rating in 64 countries.
With billions of users and fast developing business, SHAREit servers must handle tens of thousands of concurrent requests per second, which exposes this start-up company to several technical problems such as data storage, server maintenance, and architecture optimization, as well as challenges in human, physical and financial resources. Coupled with its expansion in the global market, the company looks for a cloud provider who can ensure global coverage, stable service, and high availability.
Global Coverage
Faced with a huge global user base, whether the selected cloud provider can serve global users efficiently and smoothly while facilitating its continued overseas market development is the primary concern of SHAREit.
By March 2018, Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud has covered 54 availability zones in 18 geographical regions and 1 local region, serving up to 190 countries around the globe. Such an extensive global coverage of the data center is the main reason that SHAREit chose AWS.
Efficient and Smooth Operation
The Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) automatically distributes incoming app traffic across multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and IPs. It may balance changing app traffic load in one availability zone or across several zones. As a load balancer, ELB ensures high availability, automatic scalability and reliable security of an app and increases its fault tolerance.
The Amazon DynamoDB, a quick and resilient NoSQL database service, provides SHAREit with low-latency, stable, and flexibly scalable performance. If user data volume further increases, DynamoDB will meet new throughput requirements through automatic partition and SSD technology, ensuring rapid and smooth running of the servers.
Moreover, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) also act as strong support for server stability in terms of container management, CDN acceleration, and object storage.
Server-less Management and Pay-per-Use
One of the biggest advantages of server-less service is that it enables users to run code without configuring or managing their servers; and the payment method based on the actual running time and the number of triggers means no payment will be made if no code is running. SHAREit uses AWS Lambda service as a trigger of events connecting different services, and uses AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight to coordinate, query, and visualize user data. This server-less service enhances the interaction among SHAREit servers and saves resource cost.
Powerful Data Analysis
AWS provides powerful data analysis service, for example, Amazon Kinesis enables SHAREit to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data, so as to get timely insights and react quickly to new information; and the Hadoop architecture of Amazon EMR permits SHAREit to prepare regular analysis report of business intelligence data and to fast calculate products’ business value. Hence, SHAREit may develop accurate content promotion plans.
Professional Enterprise Support
SHAREit employs AWS Enterprise Support Plan which provides 24×7 services and multi-channel technical support, which means a customer may submit any number of cases and get service support at an appropriate level. The Plan assigns technical advisers to respond to customers’ requests as early as possible. Such dedicated VIP service solves problems efficiently and guarantees rapid business development. “We have a wonderful experience with AWS Enterprise Support Plan, both the technical account manager and the Support Concierge have helped us a lot. The technical account manager meets with us every week to discuss how to optimize our system and how to solve the problems encountered. We always have timely case support, including coordinating and mobilizing global backup resources, and removing service limitations. We think the Plan is extremely helpful and important to us,” says Chen Shaowei, CTO of SHAREit.
In addition, the complete services, longer history and larger market share of AWS are also among the reasons that SHAREit chose AWS.
Figure 1 and Figure 2 illustrate the big data analytics system and business system of SHAREit, the AWS cloud services used include: Amazon EC2, ELB, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Route 53, Amazon S3, Kinesis, Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Athena, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudSearch, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Cognito, AWS Data Pipeline, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), Amazon Elastic Transcoder, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, AWS Glue, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), Lambda, Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), AWS X-Ray, etc.
Figure 1: SHAREit’s big data analytics system on AWS
Figure 2: SHAREit’s business system on AWS
As a burgeoning global technology company, SHAREit deems business development its first priority. Since it is undergoing business expansion and transformation, SHAREit will constantly upgrade its basic architecture to new levels with the full support from AWS cloud platform.
AWS cloud service also enables SHAREit to substantially lower system development, operation and maintenance cost, reduce management burdens as well as achieve automatic and flexible scalability. “AWS cloud service allows us to easily achieve what cannot be achieved before, such as rapid product iteration, automatic deployment and management, and efficient operation and maintenance,” says Chen.
To handle tens of thousands of concurrent requests per second, SHAREit uses ELB to balance changing traffic of its app, improving the system availability. Furthermore, server-less services including Lambda, AWS Glue and Amazon Athena make it easy to analyze data while extracting, bringing different services closer to each other and further accelerating task processing. “AWS helps us with a lot of low-level and tedious work, so we may focus more on business innovation,” emphasizes Chen.
SHAREit also uses Elastic Transcoder, Amazon Rekognition, and other tools to process and analyze media resources, which effectively lowers barriers to developers and speeds up system development.
Chen adds: “As a pioneer of cloud computing, AWS provides diversified services to improve development efficiency and reduce operation and maintenance cost, enabling us to focus more on our business. Its wide overseas coverage also meets our demands to continuously expand in the overseas market. AWS cloud service is a strong backup indispensable to our business development.”
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