Case Study: Topsy achieves scalable, cost-effective social-media analytics and long-term storage with Amazon Web Services

Topsy - Customer Case Study

Topsy is a San Francisco–based social media analytics and search company that indexes and analyzes public content from sources like Twitter to deliver influence, sentiment, and location insights to customers such as the NFL and The New York Times. The company manages a rapidly growing archive of social data (hundreds of terabytes, with millions of new tweets daily) and needed flexible compute capacity and cost-effective long-term storage so it could reprocess historical data and continuously refine its algorithms.

Topsy uses a hybrid architecture that keeps indexing on-premises while leveraging AWS — Amazon EC2 (including Spot Instances) for on-demand, scalable compute and Amazon S3/Glacier for long-term storage and reprocessing. This approach reduced costs, let Topsy quickly test and iterate algorithms against the full index, and preserved massive historical datasets that power deeper, time-based insights and a competitive advantage.

Topsy

David Berk

Vice President of Operations