1.
How we use AWS
@mobmewireless
Vishnu Gopal

2.
About me
• Vishnu Gopal
• CTO, MobME Wireless
• SlideShare Inc
• Human-Computer Interaction at UCL, London
• twitter.com/vishnugopal

3.
MobME Wireless
• Product company: Telecom, Banking, Security,
Entrepreneurship
• We run Startup Village, a product incubator based in
Kerala & Andhra Pradesh.
• AWS user since 2008
• We have a lot of servers (physical & VMs), 100+
physical servers & lots more VMs
• www.mobme.in

4.
AWS
• Early adopter: ~2008
• Initially, mostly S3 & Cloudfront
• Now we use: EC2, RDS, ElasticCache, Route53
• This short talk has my impressions about AWS,
tradeoffs, problems in Indian context & some
suggestions about alternatives.

5.
AWS

6.
EC2
• On-demand server provisioning
• Replacement for unreliable VPS
• Thinking of switching to reserved instances
• Quick provisioning of servers
• Problem: cannot be used where regulatory
requirements require server hosting to be done
within India (some banks, most telecom)

7.
EC2
• Much better than alternatives for us (have explored
Tata Instacompute & alternatives from Netmagic)
• If you need just simple hosting, VPS is usually
cheaper
• Amazon credits for incubators like Startup Village
make it the de-facto choice!

8.
RDS
• Managed MySQL service
• Uptime of DBs is ~100%
• Convenience of managed implementations
• Relatively tuned out of the box
• At times expensive if capacity is not planned well.

9.
Elastic Cache
• Relatively new addition to our arsenal
• We are big fans of Redis, and had switched our
memcached installations to Redis a long time ago
• So when Elastic Cache added Redis last
September it was a logical fit.
• Great implementation, replica & failover support

10.
Route53
• Very reliable DNS
• Round-robin DNS for simple load balancing
• We host a lot of websites, and needed a central
place for DNS hosting
• We’re exploring more options here, including
linking to services like Cloudflare

11.
Other Services
• Cloudfront: great CDN
• SQS: simple queue
• SES: very cheap email, we also use Mandrill
• EBS: very little use since we don’t have a lot of
state
• Exploring: Glacier, VPC

12.
Overall Experience
• Great on-demand computing
• Reliable
• Decent management console & tooling (can do better,
for e.g. Heroku)
• Feels like bare metal
• Keeps up with the times
• Really wish we had an India availability zone

13.
Finis: Questions?