Case Study: Flipboard achieves rapid reader growth and reduced IT expenditure with Amazon Web Services

Flipboard - Customer Case Study

Flipboard, a Palo Alto–based social magazine that helps people discover, view, and share content, faced the challenge of rapidly building a scalable, production-ready infrastructure with a small engineering team and an aggressive launch schedule. They needed a way to prototype, deliver, and scale the service without the time and capital required to build a traditional data center.

Flipboard deployed 100% on AWS across multiple availability zones, using EC2 (including Hadoop), S3/CloudFront, RDS, SimpleDB, SQS, ELB, CloudWatch, and Mechanical Turk, and developed with Python, Ruby and Java SDKs. The solution let them go from concept to product in about six months with just a handful of engineers, now running hundreds of EC2 instances and gaining the flexibility to grow their reader base while reducing IT overhead.

Flipboard

Greg Scallan

Chief Architect, Flipboard