Case Study on AWS

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide distributed computing processing capacity and software tools via AWS server farms. One of these services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, available all the time, through the Internet. AWS’s virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM memory; hard-disk/SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM).

Benefits of using AWS

Easy to use

AWS is designed to allow application providers, ISVs, and vendors to quickly and securely host your applications — whether an existing application or a new SaaS-based application. You can use the AWS Management Console or well-documented web services APIs to access AWS’s application hosting platform.

Flexible

AWS enables you to select the operating system, programming language, web application platform, database, and other services you need. With AWS, you receive a virtual environment that lets you load the software and services your application requires. This eases the migration process for existing applications while preserving options for building new solutions.

Cost-Effective

You pay only for the compute power, storage, and other resources you use, with no long-term contracts or up-front commitments. For more information on comparing the costs of other hosting alternatives with AWS, see the AWS Economics Center.

Reliable

With AWS, you take advantage of a scalable, reliable, and secure global computing infrastructure, the virtual backbone of Amazon.com’s multi-billion dollar online business that has been honed for over a decade.

Scalable and high-performance

Using AWS tools, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing, your application can scale up or down based on demand. Backed by Amazon’s massive infrastructure, you have access to compute and storage resources when you need them.

Secure

AWS utilizes an end-to-end approach to secure and harden our infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures. For more information, see the AWS Security Center.

Case Studies of AWS

Use of AWS by Disney+ Hotstar

Disney+ Hotstar is an Indian subscription video on-demand streaming service owned and operated by Star India, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company India. It features two paid subscription plans — “VIP”, which focuses on domestic programs and sports content (including Indian Premier League cricket), and “Premium” featuring premium international films and television series (including HBO, Showtime and other American original series).

As of March 2020, Disney+ Hotstar has at least 300 million active users.

In February 2020, following the purchase of Star India’s parent company 21st Century Fox by Disney in 2019, the company announced plans to integrate its new international streaming brand Disney+ with Hotstar in April 2020 — benefiting Hotstar’s existing infrastructure and userbase. On 3 April 2020, the platform was merged with Disney+.

Star India officially launched Hotstar in 11 February 2015 after fifteen months of development, coinciding with the upcoming 2015 Indian Premier League (for which Star had recently acquired the streaming rights). The ad-supported service initially featured a library of over 35,000 hours of content in seven regional languages, as well as live streaming coverage of sports such as cricket (deferred live), football, and kabaddi.

Use of AWS by Pinterest

In 2016, Pinterest — one of the largest visual-bookmarking tools and social networks in the world, now with 400 million monthly active users and growing — was creating 300 GB of logs daily, and that volume was increasing rapidly. But the self-managed open-source Elasticsearch tool the company used to search and analyze the data couldn’t handle the scale. It required constant administrative work from the company’s engineering staff, resulting in ineffective data analysis and an unsustainable operational overhead. Pinterest moved to a third-party proprietary Elasticsearch solution but ultimately found the cost to be unsustainable and the solution to be unable to scale with demand.

Faced with the enormous demand for faster, more efficient log analytics at a lower cost, Pinterest moved to managed analytics using Amazon OpenSearch Service on Amazon Web Services (AWS). There, Pinterest was able not only to scale its log analysis capabilities but also to reduce operational burdens on its software engineers, improve the
security of its proprietary information and private user data, and save costs by as much as 30 percent.

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