5 Companies who bloomed after migrating their cloud to AWS

The AWS is not that small to handle the things. It has given wings to many companies like Adobe, AirBNB, Netflix, Dominos’, NASA etc.

ADOBE

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.

AIRBNB

Airbnb benefited greatly from migrating to Amazon Web Services. The flexibility and responsiveness of AWS is helping to prepare the company for future growth, and Tobi Knaup reveals that “Amazon Web Services listens to customers’ needs

A year after Airbnb launched, the company decided to migrate nearly all of its cloud computing functions to Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of service administration challenges experienced with its original provider. Nathan Blecharczyk, Co-founder & CTO of Airbnb says, “Initially, the appeal of AWS was the ease of managing and customizing the stack. It was great to be able to ramp up more servers without having to contact anyone and without having minimum usage commitments. As our company continued to grow, so did our reliance on the AWS cloud and now, we’ve adopted almost all of the features AWS provides. AWS is the easy answer for any Internet business that wants to scale to the next level.”

Airbnb has grown significantly over the last 3 years. To support demand, the company uses 200 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for its application, memcache, and search servers. Within Amazon EC2, Airbnb is using Elastic Load Balancing, which automatically distributes incoming traffic between multiple Amazon EC2 instances. To easily process and analyze 50 Gigabytes of data daily, Airbnb uses Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR). Airbnb is also using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to house backups and static files, including 10 terabytes of user pictures. To monitor all of its server resources, Airbnb uses Amazon CloudWatch, which allows the company to easily supervise all of its Amazon EC2 assets through the AWS Management Console, Command Line Tools, or a Web services API.

Airbnb believes that AWS saved it the expense of at least one operations position. Additionally, the company states that the flexibility and responsiveness of AWS is helping it to prepare for more growth. Knaup says, “We’ve seen that Amazon Web Services listens to customers’ needs. If the feature does not yet exist, it probably will in a matter of months. The low cost and simplicity of its services made it a no-brainer to switch to the AWS cloud.”

NETFLIX

Back in 2008, Netflix was majorly working on DVD-by-mail service. Due to the above mentioned database corruption incident, DVD shipping was disrupted for three days. Netflix management decided to move to the cloud, away from relational systems in their data centers. The shift happened from vertical scaling of particular failure points to horizontal scaling of distributed systems which were highly reliable. The cloud was that of AWS (Amazon Web Services) which offered the company the ability to scale as much as they needed. Previously, Netflix team had to sit with their IT team to implement the scale up whenever their demand increased. Scalability was a huge issue with physical data warehousing. After shifting to AWS, scaling became seamless as petabytes of data could be used to stream videos within minutes, thanks to elasticity of the cloud. Based on user demand and with the help of AWS, Netflix could scale-up or down their data warehousing.

Today, Netflix is the 10th largest Internet company in the world. Are you aware that during the peak traffic hours more than one-third of North American Internet traffic goes through Netflix’s systems? ‘Supporting such rapid growth would have been extremely difficult out of our own data centers; we simply could not have racked the servers fast enough,’ Netflix’s blog post says. It continues, ‘Elasticity of the cloud allows us to add thousands of virtual servers and petabytes of storage within minutes, making such an expansion possible.’ So, that is the power of Amazon Web Services propelling one of the most ambitious companies on earth, Netflix, into uncharted territory and runaway success!

Dominos’

Dominos’ order management system supports the major part of its business. While the customers could place orders through two interfaces — web and mobile, Dominos team was struggling with the performance issues of the order management system.

This mostly happened because many users’ browse menus and offers, but did not place an order and majority were not even logged into their system as customers. This resulted in high browsing load which the existing on-premise server could not handle. To combat the performance and scalability issues, Dominos wanted to migrate to AWS.

BlazeClan conducted an exhaustive study of the existing system and charted out a roadmap to migrate their order management system to AWS.

The team of certified SAs proposed the following solution to overcome this issue:

• Discovery of the existing architecture, assessing cloud readiness and designing of the AWS environment. This also included assistance in preparing the order management system cloud ready.
• Implementation of the AWS environment, setting up IAM user management and authorization authentication as per the underlying best practices. This also included migrating the order management system to AWS and setting up Cloud Front to provide a better browsing experience. Implementation of the auto-scaling groups with ELB to make the existing order management system highly scalable and elastic in nature.
• Testing of the order management system to validate support for 10s of thousands of concurrent users.

NASA

When NASA decided to move to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment, the agency faced significant security challenges. In addition to providing a single, secure cloud platform for more than 200,000 pages of content and more than 100 applications, they needed to secure shared services for various departments and team members. Simultaneously, the solution needed to comply with federal regulations, including FedRAMP, FISMA, NIST, as well as NASA Policy. “NASA wanted to take a bold, but secure leap to the cloud to gain benefits across the entire organization,” said Mariam Es-Haq, Co-Founder and Vice President of the MindPoint Group.

With NASA’s 1,500 public-facing websites, 2,000 diverse intranets and extranets, and live streams of rocket launches and other major events, they needed a solution to provide protection in a scalable, public environment. “NASA has a very elastic environment, with both traffic and application surges. To ensure the AWS environment was always protected, they needed a security solution that provided visibility into threats across their IT landscape,” said Daniel Shepherd, Director, Engineering and Innovation at MindPoint Group.

MindPoint Group deployed Trend Micro™ Deep Security™ to protect NASA’s AWS cloud environment. The solution’s malware prevention agents protect physical, virtual, and cloud servers, while seamless integration with AWS extends NASA’s data centre security policies to cloud-based workloads and shared services. “Trend Micro’s support helped to deliver a smooth implementation experience in a complex and sensitive environment,” said Shepherd.

Deep Security™ helps NASA achieve compliance by closing gaps in protection efficiently and economically across cloud environments. As a result, the solution simplifies compliance with FedRAMP, FISMA, NIST, and NASA Policy. Deep Security also provides complete visibility of network traffic, and centralized management enables continuous monitoring and vulnerability shielding to ensure the elastic, public environment is always protected. “Deep Security provides visibility across our environment, and control over applications accessing our network,” said Rhea.

The solution also protects NASA’s cloud environment against zero-day malware and network-based attacks while minimizing operational impact from resource inefficiencies and emergency patching. The intrusion prevention system (IPS) capability secures NASA’s numerous web applications and Deep Security automates and simplifies the agency’s cloud operations across AWS. “Being able to build standard machine images and environments in AWS with integrated Trend Micro agents, allows us to rapidly scale with the demand of our applications,” said Rhea.

NASA significantly reduced monthly operations and maintenance costs with Trend Micro™ Deep Security™ by utilising a single suite for all required security tools. The secure, cloud platform eliminated silos to enhance safety, insights, and data security. Consolidated metrics improved reporting for operations engineers, managers, and executives. “Trend Micro engineers helped with this pathbreaking transformation and made sure it worked with GovCloud. Trend Micro Deep Security reduced the infrastructure footprint, streamlined deployment, cut overhead, and improved analyst focus,” said Rhea.

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