Fast Company magazine has an interesting article in its September issue called “Animoto: The No-Infrastructure Startup“. Animoto’s traffic jumped from 25,000 users to 700,000 in one week soon after they introduced their Facebook app in March 2008.
The interesting part however, is in the article title. Animoto’s technology is very resource hungry because the service is based on video. That means lots of expensive hardware.
Instead of investing in servers, they decided to outsource to the cloud:
We made the decision that we would re-implement the entire stack on Amazon Web Services in lieu of just using a regular hosting provider. That was a tough decision. We had to delay our launch by three months.
This paid off. When the Facebook app brought them all the new users:
the number of servers required to create these Animoto videos scaled from 50 to 5,000 in [a week]. [With] our own serving room [or a] hosting provider, it’s impossible to have 50 physical servers and grow it to 5,000 servers in that period of time. It’s insane. …
But with Amazon’s webservices:
the only real asset we have in our office, and the biggest thing we bought recently, was a fancy espresso machine.
This does mean that when Amazon has problems, so does Animoto.
Nonetheless, thanks to Amazon, the only hardware infrastructure a startup needs to support 700,000 users is one espresso machine.
