Case Study: MovieStarPlanet scales for peak demand, cuts infrastructure costs 20%, and accelerates innovation with Amazon Web Services

MovieStar Planet - Customer Case Study

MovieStarPlanet, a Copenhagen-based maker of social games for tweens with about 10 million monthly active users (250 million registered, ~150,000 concurrent at peak), faced serious scalability limits from hosting in a local data center. Daily and seasonal usage spikes—exacerbated by a successful Christmas TV campaign—required hardware purchases and provisioning that could take weeks, leaving the company unable to respond quickly to surges in traffic.

To fix this, MovieStarPlanet moved its web services to AWS, using EC2 with Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling, VPC, S3/CloudFront for user content, DynamoDB for scalable data, CloudFormation for consistent deployments, and ElastiCache for fast caching. The result: automatic scaling for daily and seasonal peaks, support for a 30% increase in users, a 20% reduction in infrastructure costs, far fewer pager calls, faster environment provisioning, and greater developer agility.

MovieStarPlanet

Peer Jakobsen

Chief Technology Officer