Transitioning to Cloud – a Case Study

Over the last few years, we have been closely exploring the business case behind all of the hype surrounding the cloud. Here is an example of a recent business problem led us to choose Amazon S3 as the solution.

As our customer’s business began to grow, our disk-space requirement also began to increase. The total size of the images ran into several gigabytes. We paid $5 for every 500 MB addition of disk-space to the hosting provider. This made our hosting cost shoot up to several hundred of dollar every year. And since our customer did not charge anything from her customers, the cost of hosting images became a fixed cost that she incurred every year to keep the site up and running.

This situation forced us to look elsewhere for hosting images and we considered Amazon S3. The first glance at S3 storage pricing confirmed that discontinuing our arrangement with the current hosting provider was a no-brainer.  Whereas 1GB of additional disk-space costed us $10 per month with our current host, with S3 it would cost us just $0.125! That is a difference of nearly 99%. And this is not taking into account the free-tier which is offered to first-time AWS customers and the option of reduced redundancy storage – which reduces cost even further. The pricing for HTTP requests and data transfer were also minimal. The move to switch to S3 became irresistible.

Our developers quickly figured out that the Amazon S3 API was robust enough to handle our requirements and keep the functionality of our site unaffected. We decided to make the move.

The first-time bulk transfer of our existing images to S3 presented us with a few challenges.  The simplest option was to use the Amazon S3 console and upload our images. This option failed because Amazon’s console was (and is!) not quite capable of handling the volume of images that we tried to upload. The other option was to download all of the images from our current server, write it to a physical storage device and send it to Amazon. This option would cost us $80, flat. Our developers finally wrote scripts to transfer images in bulk over the Internet. This was combined with limited usage of AWS console. With this combination, we managed to transfer all of the images.

Amazon has also added features to create rules for automatic object deletion. This automatically takes care of some of our scheduler code and obviates the need for writing new code with Amazon API. With the move to S3, the size of the code hosted in DASP has also become very small. This has opened up the possibility of considering other hosting options including Amazon EC2.

Stylusinc helps businesses look at ways to increase revenue and/ or reduce costs using mobile and cloud technology. If you have a problem that you would have us solve, contact us, and let our experts leverage Stylusinc’s 12 years of technology and business experience to grow your business.