Amazon Web Services Blog

Everyday, we hear new stories about a cool new startup and its success story.

Today, It was WalkScore.com. The website offers some great information about which neighborhood/city is more walkable than the rest (San francisco was #1 and Seattle was #6). Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. I think it is a great site for those who are consider moving to a new neighborhood or those who simply like the car-free lifestyle, especially because the gas prices are setting new records everyday.

This Seattle-based innovative startup hit almost all the major newspapers, blogs and websites last week from SF Chronicle to Washington Post, Los Angeles Times Blog to ABC News, From USA Today to MSNBC.

In an email, Matt Lerner from WalkScore says:

We would never have weathered being the #1 story on Yahoo! yesterday if it weren't for Amazon!  THANK YOU!

We're a hybrid-philanthropy business which means we prioritize social good over profit--and therefore we're on a pretty tight infrastructure budget :-)  What's so great about Amazon cloud computing is that it was very cheap from an infrastructure and dev standpoint for us to scale up quickly.  In a nutshell we have only one physical web server and didn't want to deal with the expense of a hardware upgrade so:

• We set up 4 EC2 instances to serve the walkability heat map tiles you see overlaid on top of the Google maps. Here is Seattle for example.
• We moved all of our images, CSS, and JS files to Amazon S3 which took a big load off of our one web server.
• We were able to accommodate a spike of about 80K unique visitors during a three hour period thanks to Amazon

One great article which I would like to highlight is How We Built a Web Hosting Infrastructure on EC2. Its a nice read if you are trying to host your website on Amazon EC2.

-- Jinesh

Does your desk look like this photo? No comment on where the photo was taken, of course… There’s hope!

Pixily just launched, with a business model that could be described as "NetFlix in reverse". They offer a plan that allows you to send them one envelope per month (envelopes can contain up
to 50 items) filled with documents that you want scanned and made searchable. This base plan costs $14.95 per month, and of course higher volume plans are available.

Prasad Thammineni, CEO
of Pixily, came to our AWS Startup Event last fall in Boston, where I had the opportunity  to meet him. Pixily is based in Waltham, MA and a
big user of AWS–in fact, a Prasad says "We use EC2, S3 and SQS. AWS has helped us democratize
expensive technology and make it accessible to consumers and small businesses.
This technology until now was available to only large enterprises."

You can read more about Pixily in this Boston Globe article. The article included this gem:

"Pixily has economized by building the entire website atop Amazon’s Web
services infrastructure, which allows a company to rent servers and storage
space as needed. "That gives us the flexibility to add more servers based on our
demand, as traffic increases, instead of paying for them at the outset," says
chief technology officer Vikram Kumar"

 – Mike