Case Study: Scribd achieves 63% cost savings and scalable document processing with Amazon Web Services

Scribd - Customer Case Study

Scribd, founded in San Francisco in 2007, is a social publishing and reading service that converts user-uploaded documents into web-readable formats and shares them across web and mobile platforms. As its user base grew, Scribd faced the challenge of scaling storage and compute resources to process and serve millions of documents cost‑effectively while improving backup coverage.

Scribd built a scalable processing grid on AWS—using Amazon S3 for document storage, Amazon EC2 (and the AWS SDK for Ruby) to convert files, and a master/slave system that dynamically provisions On‑Demand or Spot Instances. By running up to 2,000 Spot Instances for batch jobs they cut costs by about 63% (roughly $10,500 for a particular job), resolved issues with AWS Support, and adopted Amazon Glacier for low‑cost backups—resulting in reliable, scalable processing and more comprehensive, economical data protection.

Scribd

Jared Friedman

Co-Founder, Scribd States