Amazon Web Services helps CozyCot achieve significant cost savings

By SMBWorld Asia Editors | Aug 2, 2011

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Started in 2001 as a social networking Website, CozyCot.com is a forum where women share information and views on a broad range of subjects such as, beauty, fashion, lifestyle, entertainment, health, parenting, and food. Although CozyCot.com is geared to East Asian and Southeast Asian women, its members span many cultures and countries.

CozyCot recently partnered with Mediology Software, an Indian-based company and Amazon Web Services (AWS) provider to bring cloud computing and Amazon’s suite of services to the Website. To achieve CozyCot’s goals of regional migration, infrastructure optimization, and service improvement, Mediology used the three-tier SOA stack:

Storage. This base tier comprises Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), as well as a subversion repository backed by an Amazon EBS snapshot volume.

Elastic Computing. This tier includes the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), with its own Elastic IPs on an auto-scaled configuration. Amazon CloudWatch is used for constant load monitoring of master instances.

On-Demand Scaling. The third tier includes an Elastic Load Balancer, with several master instances attached, which forms the only permanent deployment of the servers. Additional instances scale up or down, depending on the load.

Prior to implementing AWS technology, CozyCot used dedicated servers to run the Website, which turned out to be expensive and frequently unreliable. Searching for more efficient and cost-effective option, CozyCot turned to Amazon Web Services. The AWS solution offered several features that were critical for the company – including dynamic scalability and the ability to save on costs by reserving capacity. Another key feature is the exceptional ease that AWS has in working with media centric applications.

Although there are many exceptional benefits of using AWS, Nicole Yee (founder of CozyCot), believes that three features are particularly outstanding:

-Significant cost savings available through the use of reserved instances
-The ability to monitor utilization based on bytes, computing hours, and database connections
-The delivery of a powerful solution that is formed by integrating a variety of disparate services into a cohesive unit

As a result of Mediology Software and the AWS solution, CozyCot was able to improve its bottom line. Nicole Yee explains that “the most significant impact in cost savings is in terms of human resource deployment. This is because our team of programmers does not have to worry about site crashes once the AWS is set up properly. They simply focus on what they do best…write programs to enhance the community experience. This form of savings creates significant value for the long-term growth of our company.”