Crushing Bandwidth – One Cloud at a Time

Here at CloudAve we're constantly looking for new case studies that justify our love of all things in the cloud. I came across a really interesting post (by the way – big ups to Diigo who we use for our collaborative sharing tool) that is an excellent case.

Heavy is a ad revenue company that utilises video. In a twist however instead of selling ads directly in the video stream, heavy sells an enormous ad that surrounds the video. Example below;

The CTO of heavy describes the lumpy revenue they earned – great in holiday times and shallow or non-existent through the rest of the year. This would have been fine but hosting charges don't change with revenue drops – Heavy was still faced with six figure hosting charges from traditional storage companies (in this case Rackspace and Akamai).

As is often the case in situations like this, a C-level fracas ensued with the CFO telling the CTO to do something! Being a forward looking chap the CTO investigated the then new and unproved Amazon Web Services offering. The graph below tells the story it shows pre-shift and post-shift bandwidth utilised;

It has to be said it isn't a complete like-for-like comparison. The various points on the chart indicate different changes;

1. Heavy remodelled it's backend to be more RESTful and sliced it all into nice bite sized pieces
2. Indicates where Heavy took the funds saved from the above changes and used it to fund an initial experiment on Amazon S3 the experiment proved successful and so…
3. Is where Heavy put the pedal to the metal and begun to move everything from old-world to new-world storage (cost details below)
4. Is where Heavy went hell-for-leather and moved their CDN off Akamai and onto the cloud

It's a great story – the metrics are pretty outstanding. As Heavy says;

That's a serious saving and indicates just how persuasive cloud based storage can be. Here at CloudAve we love to hear feel good stories that detail the benefits of a move to the clouds – if you've got a story you'd like us to share, feel free to contact us.

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