Case Study of Some Companies that got benefitted from AWS…

Raghav Laddha
8 min readMar 12, 2021

Companies that are worth more than a billion dollars or Unicorns as they call them can easily setup their own data centers and have the budget. However, they still prefer to use Amazon AWS for most of their hosting needs because of the benefit amazon AWS provides even their own data centers.

In this article, I have shortlisted some companies that are using Amazon AWS and are worth more than billion dollars but firstly i would like to brief about what is AWS and what’s its use…

What Is AWS Exactly?

AWS is made up of so many different cloud computing products and services. The highly profitable Amazon division provides servers, storage, networking, remote computing, email, mobile development, and security. AWS can be broken into three main products: EC2, Amazon’s virtual machine service, Glacier, a low-cost cloud storage service, and S3, Amazon’s storage system. AWS is so large and present in the computing world that it’s far outpaced its competitors. As of February 2020, one independent analyst reports AWS has over a third of the market at 32.4%, with Azure following behind at half that amount 17.6%, and Google Cloud at 6%.

AWS has 76 availability zones in which its servers are located. These serviced regions are divided in order to allow users to set geographical limits on their services (if they so choose), but also to provide security by diversifying the physical locations in which data is held. Overall, AWS spans 245 countries and territories.

Cost Savings

Jeff Bezos has likened Amazon Web Services to the utility companies of the early 1900s. One hundred years ago, a factory needing electricity would build its own power plant but, once the factories were able to buy electricity from a public utility, the need for pricey private electric plants subsided. AWS is trying to move companies away from physical computing technology and onto the cloud.

Traditionally, companies looking for large amounts of storage would need to physically build a storage space and maintain it. Storing on a cloud could mean signing a pricey contract for a large amount of storage space that the company could “grow into”. Building or buying too little storage could be disastrous if the business took off and expensive if it didn’t.

The same applies to computing power. Companies that experience surge traffic would traditionally end up buying loads of power to sustain their business during peak times. On off-peak times — May for tax accountants for example — computing power lays unused, but still costing the firm money.

With AWS, companies pay for what they use. There’s no upfront cost to build a storage system and no need to estimate usage. AWS customers use what they need and their costs are scaled automatically and accordingly.

Scalable and Adaptable

Since AWS’s cost is modified based on the customers’ usage, start-ups and small businesses can see the obvious benefits of using Amazon for their computing needs. In fact, AWS is great for building a business from the bottom as it provides all the tools necessary for companies to start up with the cloud. For existing companies, Amazon provides low-cost migration services so that your existing infrastructure can be seamlessly moved over to AWS.

As a company grows, AWS provides resources to aid in expansion and as the business model allows for flexible usage, customers will never need to spend time thinking about whether or not they need to reexamine their computing usage. In fact, aside from budgetary reasons, companies could realistically “set and forget” all their computing needs.

Security and Reliability

Arguably, Amazon Web Services is much more secure than a company hosting its own website or storage. AWS currently has dozens of data centers across the globe which are continuously monitored and strictly maintained. The diversification of the data centers ensures that a disaster striking one region doesn’t cause permanent data loss worldwide. Imagine if Netflix were to have all of its personnel files, content, and backed-up data centralized on-site on the eve of a hurricane. Chaos would ensue.

In fact, localizing data in an easily identifiable location and where hundreds of people can realistically obtain access is unwise. AWS has tried to keep its data centers as hidden as possible, locating them in out-of-the-way locations and allowing access only on an essential basis. The data centers and all the data contained therein are safe from intrusions, and, with Amazon’s experience in cloud services, outages and potential attacks can be quickly identified and easily remedied, 24 hours a day. The same can’t be said for a small company whose computing is handled by a single IT specialist working out of a large office.

Netflix

Netflix is the online platform for video streaming with low latency and delay. The main focus of Netflix is to make it available for their customers to watch the videos on demand, of their interests.

Their main goal is to deliver the customers an ease to enjoy whatever they like. They have an estimated 7 billion hours video streaming, 50 million customers in 60 countries.

In 2009, they moved to AWS cloud to incorporate the content delivery throughout the globe. They preferred AWS because they wanted to be more focused on updating, saving and managing instances over the cloud.

To do that, they used the model of the dynamic AWS infrastructure of about tons of instances over many geographical areas. Before using AWS cloud, they were using assembly language or any protocol available for deploying content. Using AWS, they can handle the infrastructure programmatically.

Netflix is using dozens of EC2 instances running across 3 AWS regions. There are hundreds of micro services running and serving 1 billion hours of content serving per month. They use Amazon S3 for chopping the video content into 5 seconds parts, package it, and then deploy to the content delivery networks.

AWS helps them in achieving setting up a backup for disaster activity (here, Lambda helped them to copy and validate it). AWS cloud helps them in monitoring and creating alerts and trigger it to compensate the changes in situations.

They quoted that AWS Lambda helped them to build a rule-based self managing infrastructure and replacing it with the current system.

Slack

Slack is the cloud-based team collaboration tool developed in 2013 under the team of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. It was initially built for a company to work in team. Now, it is used by all over the leading enterprises with an estimate of over a million daily active users.

It was only a chat application in 2013. Later, Slack announced the acquisition of ScreenHero, that have additional features of data and file sharing along with the screen sharing. That wisely facilitate team in collaboration.

The Slack founders faced failures in their previous startup ventures. So, they worked with that experience to develop slack. They just needed an extra layer of expertise to run the infrastructure. The prior company named Tiny Speck, used AWS in 2009, which became ‘Slack Tech’. That time, this was the only viable offering for the public cloud.

Now, Slack has very simple IT architecture that is based on AWS services. They are using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for file uploads and sharing static assets, Elastic Load Balancer to balance the load across servers.

To protect the network on cloud and firewall rules with security groups, they are using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). For the protection of user credentials and accounts, they are utilizing Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control user credentials. Along with these services, they are using Redis data structure server, Apache Solr search tool, the Squid caching proxy, and a MySQL database.

Slack Integration Blueprint for AWS Lambda

To make it easier for AWS customers to manage their environment, they recently launched a collection of Slack Integration Blueprints for AWS Lambda. Amazon Web Services helps them achieving their goal with ease. Hosting Slack in AWS made their customers more confident that Slack is safe, secure, and always-on.

Adobe Systems

Adobe is the leading company for over the decades comprises over 14,000 employees. They are delivering products in digital media and digital marketing niche.

They have a strong partnership with Amazon Web Services and developed the superior product with them. Adobe adopted AWS Cloud because of the richest set of APIs and deep integration of all the automated softwares. They want to provide an efficient environment to their customers.

They used Adobe Creative Cloud with a wide variety of services that are equally helpful in enterprise and government sector. They deployed Adobe CQ cloud manager that fully manages all the services of cloud running on both Redhat and Windows. They used EBS System extensively with Elastic Beam and Cloud Formation.

Mitch Nelson (Director, Managed Services) at Adobe, while interviewing in AWS said that AWS did a great job in helping us do that, and if we have any problem ever, AWS is always there to sync in such situations. Using AWS Cloud, we achieved the multiple location support with the multi-terabyte operating environment for our customers.

Coursera

AWS at Coursera

Coursera is the online educational platform with the aim of promoting the world’s best curriculum website. They aim to spread knowledge under the kind supervision of the expertise of the relevant fields. They work in partnership with the top schools and universities all over the world.

They offer online streaming/lectures as well as the video tutorial in any relevant field of study. They have an estimated 13 million users from around 190 countries with over 1000 courses. They are delivering tutorials in collaboration with almost 120 institutions. The main concern of their website is not targeted to one field. It covers courses from Programming to song writing tutorials.

They just wanted to have efficient utilization of resources that are unused due to certain reasons. They used Amazon Elastic Container Services (ECS) to move easily to micro services-based architecture. They are using Amazon EMR, Redshift, Cassandra, Amazon RDS and many third party tool to set up their infrastructure on the cloud.

Using ECS, each job is produced as a container and ESC schedule it across the instance cluster of EC2. Amazon ECS also helps them handling all the cluster management.

Using AWS Cloud, they achieved the usability of resources, speed and agility in their processes , scalable capacity and operational efficiencies.

Thanks for Reading!!

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