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, iI have shortlisted 5 companies that are using Amazon AWS and are worth more than billion dollars.
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.
Airbnb
Airbnb is the community-driven marketplace that brings hosts and guests to one place with local and unique personal expertise. It is an online platform for rental accommodation. As per 2013 stats, there are estimated 150,000 people, that are hosted on any given night on Airbnb.
They adopted AWS Cloud for the next year of their app launch. AWS proved to be an awesome fit from the day one. They use Amazon EC2 (Server, Production, Hadoop), RDS (All relational databases), Amazon S3 (Storage, UGC), DynamoDB (Rollups, Metadata), Elasticache (Memcache) and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR).
Airbnb has been growing significantly for the past 3 years. In 2011, they were using 24 EC2 instances which keep on increasing over 1000 and it is still increasing day by day. There are 2 billion rows stored in their RDS, and this figure is incrementing day by day. They have an estimated 50TB photos in their S3.
Airbnb scales infrastructure automatically using AWS Cloud. While giving reviews on AWS, Mike Curtis (VP of Engineering-Airbnb) beautifully announced that AWS allows us to devote our resources and mindshare to the core business. We don’t need to worry about the operational infrastructure, AWS is always there to take care of everything. They dream Airbnb to be a fascinating application that can be used by everyone in finding their homes and rental apartments around the world.
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.
Fig: 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.
Netflix
Fig: Netflix architecture (runs 100% on AWS now)
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.
Coursera
Fig: 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.
The post Top 5 Billion Dollar Companies Using AWS Cloud appeared first on Vizteck.