1.
Getting to Scale
Calvin Kizana
CEO, PicMix

2.
What is PicMix?
PicMix is an advanced mobile photo sharing app and
integrated platform for brand engagement and
advertising to serve brand activations and marketplace
digitally with clear and solid monetization model.

3.
on the
Amazon Cloud
Use many AWS Services:
EC2, S3, SES, SNS,
Cloudwatch
+Experimenting with
CloudFront and Auto-scaling
AWS enables us to focus
on product & code, and user
acquisition – not infra
better performance,
reliability & infinite scale
Result?
go global easily
Hyper growth without worries
Costs? only $0.05 user/year

4.
Getting to Scale
Dhruv Parpia & Joe Ziegler

5.
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The server is temporarily unable
to service your request due to
maintenance downtime or capacity
problems. Please try again later.

6.
With AWS, scale from one instance…

7.
…to thousands
Fully automated!

8.
BUT…
How do I scale my architecture to
support my first 10M users?

9.
“Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast”
Eric Ries, author of NY Times
bestseller “The Lean Startup”

10.
01 02 03 04
Idea MVP ProfitabilityScale

11.
Getting to Scale
By building a scalable Architecture to
support your first 10M users

12.
1. Dev & Test
2. Alpha Release
3. Beta Release

13.
Production 1.0
Architecture

14.
Database Options
Self-Managed Fully-Managed
Database Server
on Amazon EC2
Your choice of
database running on
Amazon EC2
Bring Your Own
License (BYOL)
Amazon
DynamoDB
Managed NoSQL
database service
using SSD storage
Seamless scalability
Zero administration
Amazon RDS
Relational Database
as a managed
service
Flexible licensing:
BYOL or License
Included

15.
But how do I choose what
DB technology I need?
SQL? NoSQL?

16.
Some folks won’t like this.
But…

17.
Start with SQL databases

18.
But, but, but, but…

19.
No. You don’t.

20.
Start with SQL databases

21.
Established and well worn technology
Lots of existing code, communities, books, tools, etc
Clear patterns to scalability
You aren’t going to break SQL DBs in your first 10
million users. No really, you won’t
Why SQL?

22.
• Database-as-a-Service
• No need to install or manage database
instances
• Scalable and fault tolerant configurations
Feature Details
Platform support Create MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle
Preconfigured Get started instantly with sensible default
settings
Automated patching Keep your database platform up to date
automatically
Backups Automatic backups and point in time
recovery using snapshots
Manual DB snapshots
Failover Automated failover to slave hosts in event of
a failure
Replication Easily create read-replicas of your data and
seamlessly replicate data across availability
zones
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

23.
Automatic resizing of
compute clusters based on
demand
Trigger auto-scaling policy
Feature Details
Control Define minimum and maximum instance pool
sizes and when scaling and cool down occurs.
Integrated to Amazon
CloudWatch
Use metrics gathered by CloudWatch to drive
scaling.
Instance types Run Auto Scaling for On-Demand and Spot
Instances. Compatible with VPC.
as-create-auto-scaling-group MyGroup
--launch-configuration MyConfig
--availability-zones us-east-1a
--min-size 4
--max-size 200
Auto-Scaling Amazon
CloudWatch

24.
Production 1.0
Architecture

25.
Production 1.0 Architecture
Well-designed, 2 Tier architecture
Highly Available due to Multiple Availability Zone
Load Balancing & Auto-Scaling for full scalability
Fully managed Database included
Capable of serving >10K-100Ks users

26.
BUT…

27.
Production 1.0 Architecture
Wasted server capacity for static content
Reliability and durability are not yet optimal
End-user experience could be improved thru
offloading & caching

28.
SO…

29.
Let’s add
Simple Storage Service (S3)
CloudFront
to optimize the end-user experience

30.
Durable storage, any object
99.999999999% durability of objects
Unlimited storage of objects of any type
Up to 5TB size per object
Feature Details
Flexible object store Buckets act like drives, folder structures within
Access control Granular control over object permissions
Server-side encryption 256bit AES encryption of objects
Multi-part uploads Improved throughput & control
Object versioning Archive old objects and version new ones
Object expiry Automatically remove old objects
Access logging Full audit log of bucket/object actions
Web content hosting Serve content as web site with built in page handling
Notifications Receive notifications on key events
Import/Export Physical device import/export service
Simple Storage Service (S3)

31.
• World-wide content distribution
network
• Easily distribute content to end
users with low latency, high data
transfer speeds, and no
commitments
Feature Details
Fast Multiple world-wide edge locations to serve content as close to your users as possible
Integrated with other services Works seamlessly with S3 and EC2 origin servers
Dynamic content Supports static and dynamic content from origin servers
Streaming Supports rtmp from S3 and includes support for live streaming from Adobe FMS and Microsoft
Media Server
CloudFront

32.
Production 1.2
Architecture

33.
Production 1.2 Architecture
Well-designed, 2 Tier architecture
Highly Available due to Multiple Availability Zone
Load Balancing & Auto-Scaling for full scalability
Fully managed Database included
Static content stored in durable, consistent way
Improved end-user experience through CDN
Capable of serving >100K-1M+ users

34.
BUT…

35.
Production 1.2 Architecture
You are now at Scale…
…with lots of data…
…and need to optimize continuously.
But how and where?

36.
SO…

37.
Let’s add
Big Data
for analytics of web, mobile, gaming,
and log data

38.
Multiple managed AWS services for Big Data

39.
• Managed, elastic Hadoop cluster
• Integrates with S3 & DynamoDB
• Leverage Hive & Pig analytics scripts
Feature Details
Scalable Use as many or as few compute instances running Hadoop as you want. Modify the number of
instances while your job flow is running
Integrated with other
services
Works seamlessly with S3 as origin and output. Integrates with DynamoDB
Comprehensive Supports languages such as Hive and Pig for defining analytics, and allows complex definitions in
Cascading, Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, R, or C++
Cost effective Works with Spot instance types
Monitoring Monitor job flows from with the management console
Elastic MapReduce (EMR)

40.
Foursquare…
Founded in 2009
112M in Venture Capital
33 million users
1.3 million businesses using the service
…generates a lot of Data
3.5 billion check-ins
15M+ venues,
Terabytes of log data

41.
Uses EMR for
Evaluation of new features
Machine learning
Exploratory analysis
Daily customer usage reporting
Long-term trend analysis

42.
Benefits of EMR
Ease-of-Use
“We have decreased the processing time for urgent data-analysis”
Flexibility
To deal with changing requirements & dynamically expand reporting clusters
Costs
“We have reduced our analytics costs by over 50%”

43.
Production 1.3
Architecture

44.
Production 1.3 Architecture
Well-designed, 2 Tier architecture
Highly Available due to Multiple Availability Zone
Load Balancing & Auto-Scaling for full scalability
Static content stored in durable, consistent way
Improved end-user experience through CDN
Big Data analytics built in for continuous optimization
Capable of serving >1m-10M+ users

45.
DEMO
Getting to Scale

46.
Thank you!
aws.amazon.com/start-ups
aws.amazon.com/free

47.
AWS Coding Challenge