How we use AWS @mobmewireless

Vishnu Gopal

About me• Vishnu Gopal

• CTO, MobME Wireless

• SlideShare Inc

• Human-Computer Interaction at UCL, London

• twitter.com/vishnugopal

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

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.

AWS

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)

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!

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.

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

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

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

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

Finis: Questions?