ARTH - 2020
Task - 2
Case Studies of Companies Got Benefited from AWS
#aws #awscloud #awscsa #arthbylw #vimaldaga #righteducation #educationredefine #rightmentor #worldrecordholder #ARTH #linuxworld #makingindiafutureready #righeudcation
There are a lot of companies that are benefited from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and mentioning them all of them in detail in a single post is impossible, so in this post, I have mentioned some of the companies who get benefited
from AWS are follows: -
Let’s Start
1. Unilever Case Study
Unilever was formed in 1930 by the merger of Dutch margarine producer, Margarine Unie and British soap
maker, Lever Brothers. Today, the consumer goods
giant sells food, home care, refreshments, and personal
care products in over 190 countries. Unilever has
headquarters in London, United Kingdom and
Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and subsidiaries in
over 90 countries. The company employs more
than 170,000 people. In 2012, Unilever reported more
than €51 billion in revenue.
The Challenge
Unilever North America in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey needed to re-design its infrastructure to support Unilever’s digital marketing approach. Unilever previously used on-premises data centers to host its web properties, all of which had different technologies and processes. “We needed to standardize our environment to support a faster time-to-market," says Sreenivas Yalamanchili, Digital Marketing Services (DMS) Global Technical Manager. Unilever optimizes its business model by testing a marketing campaign in a pilot country. If the campaign is successful, the company deploys it to other countries and regions. The IT organization wanted to use the cloud to implement the same process.
Why Amazon Web Services
After a comprehensive RFP and review process involving more than 16 companies, Unilever chose Amazon Web Services (AWS). Unilever’s priorities in choosing a digital marketing platform included flexibility, a global infrastructure, technology, as well as a rich ecosystem of members. “With AWS, we have the same hosting provider for all regions, which means we don’t have to customize and tweak hosting solutions per region,” says Yalamanchili. “Unilever is focused on delivering great brands to consumers; it’s not an IT shop. We’re able to spend less and get more innovation by working with AWS and members of the AWS Partner Network.”
The Unilever IT team had two goals for the AWS migration: deliver a common technology platform for websites with regional content delivery architecture, and migrate existing web properties to the cloud.
To develop the platform, Unilever attended an AWS workshop to design the architecture. Then the DMS team built a pilot platform (a disaster recovery site for third-party hosting in Miami) for stakeholder review. After obtaining business approval, Unilever chose CSS Corporation, an Advanced Consulting Partner member of the Amazon Partner Network (APN), for system integration and application development. The DMS team worked with CSS to develop a global content management system (CMS) . The CMS platform lets agencies build brand web sites globally and publish them across several AWS regions. Unilever uses a HAProxy load balancer to improve performance of its web sites and runs its databases on Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL.
The Benefits
For Unilever, moving to the AWS Cloud improved business agility and operational efficiency. “Previously, requesting a website for a marketing campaign was a lengthy process,” says Yalamanchili. “By using AWS, we improved time to launch for a digital marketing campaign from two weeks to an average of two days. That’s more than seven times faster than our traditional environment. If a brand manager has an idea, he or she can implement it before the competition,”
“Using AWS saves us time,” he continues. “I can simply go to the AWS website and plug in numbers to calculate costs. That makes it easy for me to set up a standard billing model for websites. It takes our partner, CSS, less than 12 hours to calculate pricing for a campaign website. I can comfortably say to my marketing folks that we have the capacity for anything we want to do. We can focus on innovation rather than infrastructure.”
“The other advantage is the responsiveness of the AWS Cloud,” says Yalamanchili. “By using AWS, one of the brand managers was able to completely alter a campaign within 24 hours, which wouldn’t happen with the physical infrastructure.”
“AWS listens to us and helps come up with ideas to do things differently that are beneficial,” says Morgan. “I really enjoy the rapid rate of innovation from AWS.” Yalamanchili adds, “With AWS, it’s the customer's way, always. AWS has proved to us that it's the customer that matters by listening to us and innovating products and services."
“AWS listens to us and helps come up with ideas to do things differently that are beneficial."
--Nick Morgan
Enterprise Architect for Digital Marketing
2. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Case Study
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(JPL) has developed the All-Terrain
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Hex-Limbed Extra-Terrestrial Explorer
(ATHLETE) robot. As a multi-purpose
vehicle, each of the ATHLETE’s six
limbs is attached to a wheel, enabling the vehicle
to travel across various types of terrain—ranging
from smooth surfaces to rolling hills to ruggedly steep terrain. However, the wheels can also be locked to transform the limbs into general purpose legs that can be used as feet. The ATHLETE robot can also be used for loading, unloading, and transporting cargo for long distances.
The Challenge
As part of the Desert Research and Training Studies (D-RATS), NASA/JPL performs annual field tests on the ATHLETE robot in conjunction with robots from other NASA centers. While driving the robots, operators depend on high-resolution satellite images for guidance, positioning, and situational awareness. To streamline the processing of the satellite images, NASA/JPL engineers developed an application that takes advantage of the parallel nature of the workflow. NASA/JPL relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for this effort.
Why Amazon Web Services
The application is built on Polyphony, which is a modular workflow orchestration framework designed to streamline the process of leveraging hundreds of nodes on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). By accommodating excess capacity on local machines and spare resources in the supercomputing center, Polyphony meshes perfectly with the AWS Cloud. Most important, Polyphony enables the resources to work together to achieve a common goal. By using Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), NASA/JPL developers can deploy massive computations on Amazon EC2 by writing as little as a single class.
NASA/JPL had previously used Polyphony to validate the utility of cloud computing for processing hundreds of thousands of small images in an Amazon EC2 environment. However, NASA/JPL has adopted the cluster compute environment for processing huge images and recently processed a 3.2 giga-pixel image to support the ATHLETE robot operations in its 2010 D-RATS field test. Khawaja Shams, Senior Solution Architect, reports that “AWS resources completed the work in less than two hours on a cluster of 30 Cluster Compute Instances. This demonstrates a significant improvement over previous implementations.”
The Benefits
In addition to its support for the ATHLETE robot, Polyphony has been delivered to the Mars Science Laboratory to serve as one of the primary data processing and delivery pipelines that process data downloaded from Mars. Shams explains that the application “allowed us to process nearly 200,000 Cassini images within a few hours under $200 on AWS.” Due to the lack of elasticity available internally before switching to AWS, Shams says that “we were only able to use a single machine locally and spent more than 15 days on the same task.” The efficiency and cost-savings offered by AWS has proven invaluable.
AWS resources completed the work in less than two hours on a cluster of 30 Cluster Compute Instances. This demonstrates a significant improvement over previous implementations.”
--Khawaja Shams
Senior Solution Architect, NASA/JPL
3. IMDb Case Study
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The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is one of the
world’s most popular and authoritative sources for movie, TV and celebrity content with more than 100 million unique visitors per month.
Why Amazon Web Services
IMDb uses Amazon CloudFront to host search data for the IMDb magic search feature, finding the movie or person you're looking for in just a few key presses. In the mobile space, every millisecond is precious. Mobile customers especially love getting right to the movie they want without having to type a full search query. Amazon CloudFront makes this experience the fastest possible by distributing the content physically close to our worldwide user base. The speed of light becomes a competitive advantage; there is no data service faster than a static cache geographically nearby.
To get the lowest possible latency, all possible results are pre-calculated with a document for every combination of letters in search. Each document is pushed to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and thereby to Amazon CloudFront, putting the documents physically close to the users. The theoretical number of possible searches to calculate is mind-boggling—a 20-character search has 23 x 1030 combinations—but in practice, using IMDb's authority on movie and celebrity data can reduce the search space to about 150,000 documents, which Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront can distribute in just a few hours. IMDb creates indexes in several languages with daily updates for datasets of over 100,000 movie and TV titles and celebrity names.
The Benefits
While typical services in a centralized data center have a real-world latency floor of around 100ms in the US, a CDN can achieve sub-100ms latencies internationally. "By hosting our search and video files on Amazon CloudFront, we have zero servers to maintain, which makes our reliability sky-high. Amazon CloudFront gives us ultrafast, scalable, and reliable search all over the world," said Doug Treder, senior software developer for IMDb.com. Just for the IMDb iPhone app alone, on a single day in January IMDb had over 2.3M requests, with costs an order-of-magnitude less than that of server hosting.
IMDb also uses Amazon CloudFront to host the latest movie trailers, such as “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1” world exclusive premiere. CloudFront helps to protect IMDb's video content with private URLs, and is cost-effective to support millions of viewers per day across our websites and mobile platforms. Figures 1-3 demontrate IMDb on AWS.
IMDb offers a searchable database of more than 1.8 million movies, TV and entertainment programs and more than 4 million cast and crew members. A free service, IMDb.com celebrated its 20th anniversary in October 2010. IMDb is conveniently accessible anywhere via its popular “Movies & TV” app for iPhone and iPad that has been installed by more than 12 million consumers and is available worldwide in nine languages. IMDb’s mobile platform also features a leading Android app which is available in seven languages and a mobile-optimized website. IMDb.com is operated by IMDb.com, Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN).
By hosting our search and video files on Amazon CloudFront, we have zero servers to maintain, which makes our reliability sky-high. Amazon CloudFront gives us ultrafast, scalable, and reliable search all over the world.”
--Doug Treder
Senior Software Developer, IMDb.com
4. Autodesk Uses AWS to Develop User Communities, Increase Community Participation, and Get Answers to Community Members Faster
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Autodesk chose Amazon Web
Services (AWS) solutions to build
and rapidly deploy a machine
learning model for a new iteration
of a forum called Community Match.
The model would match the expertise of forum members with questions posed on the forum—the idea being to encourage community members who are experts on a particular subject to share their insider knowledge on Autodesk solutions. And whereas previously customers sought Autodesk support only to troubleshoot problems, now they take advantage of the knowledge within the shared community to use Autodesk software more effectively.
Developing Creative AWS-Backed Solutions to Serve Customers
Autodesk used an AWS serverless architecture to create a prototype of the knowledge model in just 1 week. “It was fun to create something from just an idea in such a short time by plugging together the different serverless capabilities that exist on AWS,” says Bradley. A webhook delivers real-time data to AWS from the third-party vendor where Community Match is hosted. “It provides a flexible architecture for us because we can carry that content in many different ways, not only keeping employees in the loop by sending things to Slack but also catering to our different user groups,” says Vizcarra. Autodesk split the forum users into groups: highly engaged, semi-engaged, and observers.
It was fun to create something from an idea so quickly by plugging together the serverless capabilities that exist within AWS.
--James Bradley
Director of Data Science, Autodesk
5. MPL Gaming Platform Goes from Zero to 40 Million Users on AWS
With the proliferation of smartphones and
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affordable mobile data plans in India,
mobile gaming is quickly becoming a
common pastime. According to Kantar
IMRB, India currently ranks fifth among
the world’s top mobile gaming markets.
Bangalore-based Mobile Premier League (MPL) is one of the biggest and fastest-growing players, offering more than 40 games via its eSports platform. All games, including fantasy sports or the country’s favorite, Rummy, can be played for cash prizes. The MPL mobile app launched in September 2018 and acquired 10 million users within three months, which met the company’s one-year subscriber goal.
Today, MPL has more than 40 million subscribers, making up 14 percent of the total mobile gaming market in India, according to the 2019 report “The Power of Mobile Gaming in India.”
Small Team for Big Jobs
The startup launched on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud because many of its DevOps engineers had experience on the platform, which accelerated time-to-market. Scalability and automation were also a priority for MPL’s AWS Cloud infrastructure. The startup began with Amazon Aurora as its primary database, using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to automate administrative tasks such as provisioning and backups. However, as its dataset grew—particularly its volume of unstructured data—MPL found that Amazon DynamoDB NoSQL database service worked better for gaming use cases because it offered low-latency data access and easy horizontal scaling.
Amazon DynamoDB can efficiently handle volume, velocity, and veracity for the data-heavy workloads typical of gaming companies. Additionally, the database automatically scales capacity to maintain performance during peak periods such as nationwide sporting events, when online traffic for MPL’s fantasy games can spike to 2.5 million hits per minute. Such automation is key in MPL’s architecture and resource planning.
Despite being a year and a half into operations, MPL’s DevOps engineering team have never had to expand since launch. “Our team of 12 engineers manages DevOps, reliability engineering, and 24/7 monitoring,” says Mukta Aphale, vice president of Reliability Engineering at MPL. “We don’t need a big team to run all our applications on AWS.” Its DevOps engineers currently use a microservices architecture for development, automating the deployment of more than 50 separate microservices using AWS CodeDeploy and AWS Lambda.
Dedicated Support
With such rapid growth, MPL has relied on support from AWS for debugging and periodic re-architecting to scale. “Nailing down the problem is often the toughest part of debugging, and AWS was always there to help us,” Aphale says. The startup recently subscribed to AWS Enterprise Support to prepare for the launch of a big campaign. Teams appreciate having an AWS technical account manager (TAM) and AWS Infrastructure Event Management (IEM) as part of the support package, with focused planning and ready assistance leading up to and during the launch.
“Having a dedicated TAM and IEM has led to a more detailed review of our architecture and guidance on how to optimize both the user experience and operating costs,” Aphale says. Early on, AWS hosted an AWS Dev Day event, where MPL teams used Amazon Inspector to uncover potential security vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. These vulnerabilities have since been resolved, and MPL has implemented Amazon GuardDuty for ongoing security monitoring.
Performance at Scale
AWS solutions architects held several discussions with MPL and shared the benefits of containerization. Following that, MPL conducted its own evaluation and moved ahead with containerizing its microservices using Kubernetes. The aim of this is twofold: to stabilize application performance at scale and improve operational efficiency. Its engineers use Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to run the containers with high availability. “We appreciate being able to control our architecture and decide where and how to automate things. Amazon EKS is much more robust than open source Kubernetes,” Aphale explains.
Implementation of containers is just the first step in MPL’s cost optimization journey. During its first year of operations, the company was focused on scaling and right-sizing its architecture. Now, teams are working on optimizing infrastructure costs and looking to innovate further. Aphale says, “We’re pleasantly surprised with the proactive help from AWS to improve our architecture and save costs.”
Working with their assigned TAM on finding the right instance types for production versus non-production workloads has gone a long way toward reducing costs. In addition, MPL signed up for the AWS Enterprise Discount Program. Since beginning cost optimization exercises, MPL has cut infrastructure costs by 40 percent. “These savings have allowed us to scale our AWS infrastructure to roll out a lot more features and games, which creates a more interesting user experience with features such as audio chat,” Aphale says.
Keeping Customers Happy
A large portion of MPL’s new customer base comes from referrals, so the business focuses heavily on customer satisfaction. For instance, because sub-millisecond latency is critical in gaming to ensure players don’t experience a lag between moves, MPL has been able to maintain an API response time of 30 milliseconds or less since its launch.
In working with AWS to fine-tune its architecture, engineers have also improved the app’s service availability. “Our app uptime has increased significantly to 99.9 percent,” Aphale says. Due to MPL’s confidence in the underlying AWS architecture, the DevOps team is more geared up to take on new challenges. Taking advantage of managed services from AWS and increased automation allow the team to take on development tasks they find interesting and to learn about technology applications such as containers firsthand.
In its road to expansion, MPL launched its gaming platform in Indonesia in July 2019 and is awaiting the launch of AWS data centers in the country by 2022. Aphale concludes, “AWS has been by our side throughout our entire growth journey, from debugging to stabilizing and optimizing to now expanding our product.”
“AWS has been by our side throughout our entire growth journey, from debugging to stabilizing and optimizing to now expanding our product.”
--Mukta Aphale
Vice President, Reliability and Engineering, MPL
6. Docker Case Study
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Docker is helping redefine the way
developers build, ship, and run applications.
At the beginning, the company focused on making the
use of containers a standard practice among developers. Now, Docker’s mission is to enable multi-container application models and create a platform to manage it all. Listen to Ben Golub, CEO of Docker, as he comments on the announcement of the Amazon EC2 Container Service and shares what’s coming next on the Docker platform.
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7. Adobe Systems Case Study
Adobe Systems Managed Services program delivers
enterprise software such as Adobe LiveCycle Forms,
Adobe Connect conferencing software, and Adobe CQ5 to
Fortune 100 companies, large multi-national corporations
, and government agencies. Adobe uses AWS to provide
multi-terabyte operating environments for its customers
. By integrating its systems with the AWS Cloud, Adobe
can focus on deploying and operating its own software
instead of infrastructure.
8. Pinterest Uses AWS to Help 200 Million Users Discover New Ideas
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Using AWS, Pinterest has tripled its use of
storage and compute over just two years
without worrying about reliability or scalability.
Pinterest provides one of the world's largest
visual-bookmarking tools, with more than 200 million users and 2 billion boards. The company has used a variety of AWS services to scale its processing, storage, and data-analysis workloads to help developers focus on delighting customers.
9. Animoto Case Study
Animoto, a New York-based online video
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service, makes it easy to make and share
videos in just a few minutes. The company
launched in 2007 using its own servers,
but moved to AWS for additional capacity. When Animoto integrated with Facebook in 2008, attracting 750,000 new users in 3 days, it used AWS to handle the load.
10. Samsung Migrates 1.1 Billion Users across Three Continents from Oracle to Amazon Aurora with AWS Database Migration Service
The cloud, as it turns out, is big enough
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for everyone. It’s even big enough for
Samsung Electronics, the world’s second
largest IT company by revenue. As users of
SamsungAccount—the company’s certification and authorization service—ballooned to over 1.1 billion, the electronics giant decided it was time to move its massive database away from its monolithic legacy Oracle internet data center (IDC) solution, which was expensive and made it difficult to scale to accommodate growing traffic. Looking to the cloud, Samsung Electronics found Amazon Web Services (AWS) a perfect fit for this shift. In less than 18 months, Samsung Electronics migrated its global Samsung Account data to Amazon Aurora, a MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud. This migration from Oracle resulted in a profound cost reduction as Samsung was able to free itself from the restrictive licensing costs of the on-premises legacy database. With the migration to cloud-native Aurora, Samsung is able to focus on innovating and positioning itself for the company’s expected growth.
The scalability of Amazon Aurora is the best benefit—especially if we focus on the cost."
--Salva Jung
Principal Architect and Engineering Manager
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