AWS Case Study : Twitch

What is AWS?

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a comprehensive, evolving cloud computing platform provided by Amazon that offering over 175 fully-featured services from data centers globally. Includes a mixture of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and packaged software as a service (SaaS) offerings. AWS services can offer an organization tools such as compute power, database storage and content delivery services

AWS Infrastructure:

The AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure is the most secure, extensive, and reliable cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Whether we need to deploy our application workloads across the globe in a single click, or we want to build and deploy specific applications closer to our end-users with single-digit millisecond latency, AWS provides we the cloud infrastructure where and when we need it.

With millions of active customers and tens of thousands of partners globally, AWS has the largest and most dynamic ecosystem. Customers across virtually every industry and of every size, including start-ups, enterprises, and public sector organizations, are running every imaginable use case on AWS.

Now AWS spans 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions around the world, and has announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain.

Benefits and advantages with aws:

→Security

→Availability

→Performance

→Global Footprint

→Scalability

→Flexibility

AWS provides a magnitude of services :

Amazon Web Services offers a broad set of global cloud-based products including compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security and enterprise applications. And also includes mainstream technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence, data lakes and analytics, and so on~

Here’s a short list :

→ Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

→ Amazon VPC

→ DynamoDB

→ Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service)

→ Amazon ElastiCache

→ AWS Lambda

→ Amazon Glacier

→ Amazon SNS

→ Amazon CloudFront

AWS CASE STUDY : Twitch

Twitch is essentially a a live content streaming video-platform that allows gamers to stream their games for others to watch while they play. First introduced in June of 2011, Twitch.tv focuses on music broadcasts, esports competition broadcasts, creative content, and video game playthroughs.

Twitch spends about $21 million per month on AWS.

AWS is used to host and deliver content for its main site (Twitch.tv), streaming and mobile sites it owns.

Here is the spending breakdown of AWS products used by Twitch, with the most money being spent on Amazon EC2:

• Amazon CloudFront — $1 million/month
• Amazon EC2 — $17 million/month
• AWS Elastic Load Balancer — $2 million/month
• Amazon Rekognition — $683,000/month
• Amazon S3 — $446,000/month

Why Twitch went for these services ?

Amazon CloudFront:

Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment.It works seamlessly with services including AWS Shield for DDoS mitigation, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing or Amazon EC2 as origins for our applications, and Lambda@Edge to run custom code closer to customers’ users and to customize the user experience. Lastly, if we use AWS origins such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2 or Elastic Load Balancing, we don’t pay for any data transferred between these services and CloudFront.

Amazon EC2:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows we to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides we with complete control of our computing resources and lets we run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.

AWS Elastic Load Balancer:

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions.

It can handle the varying load of our application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones.

Elastic Load Balancing offers three types of load balancers:

• Classic Load Balancer
• Network Load Balancer
• Application Load Balancer

Amazon Rekognition:

Amazon Rekognition makes it easy to add image and video analysis to our applications using proven, highly scalable, deep learning technology that requires no machine learning expertise to use. With Amazon Rekognition, wecan identify objects, people, text, scenes, and activities in images and videos, as well as detect any inappropriate content.

Amazon Rekognition also provides highly accurate facial analysis and facial search capabilities that we can use to detect, analyze, and compare faces for a wide variety of user verification, people counting, and public safety use cases.

Amazon S3:

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

Amazon S3 provides easy-to-use management features so you can organize your data and configure finely-tuned access controls to meet your specific business, organizational, and compliance requirements.

Few other clients of AWS:

• NASA
• Netflix
• BMW
• Adobe
• Airbnb
• Spotify
• Samsung
• Coursera
• IMDb
• Disney

In conclusion..

Aws is meant to be sort of a platform where many other companies come and use their services like hosting applications , using compute power , storage service and so on. With its major advantage being no requirement for an up front contract or commitments for long term usage not just that , it has qualities like scalability , top notch security and client friendly solutions for any company which requires its services