Achieving scale through Cloud Computing

Ashay Padwal, CTO and Director of Product, V-Serv Digital Services, said, “Being an online service provider, new mobile publishers join our ad network and start availing of ads for their properties. But we were unable to track the traffic pattern of these publishers.”

“Whenever there was a surge or dip in traffic due to any publisher having downtime, etc., we couldn’t trace it. This necessitated a solution that could scale up or down as per our requirements,” added Padwal.

When it started scouting for a solution, being a start-up, Vserv had to keep in mind the fact that its pockets were not very deep.

“As we were a start-up, it was necessary for us to be judicious with our spending. We did not want to incur upfront costs or lose our agility due to capital being locked up in servers. We preferred to use our capital for business initiatives,” he said.

As Vserv’s key component of service is serving advertisements, an activity that involves server-to-server communication, it was critical that the company had the lowest possible latency for serving up an advertisement when it received requests from the publishers’ servers.

The publishers that the company deals with are hosted out of the US, Europe and in the APAC and, therefore, it wanted a solution provider that could provide hosting facilities in these geographies.

Scouting for a solution provider

Vserv set out to find a service provider that would help it scale its operations up or down at a low cost and across a wide geographical area. The answer was to find a partner that was not only proficient in Cloud solutions but also one that had the experience of working closely with developers and customers.

With these points in mind, the company chose AWS as its technology partner.

“AWS is the pioneer in Cloud computing and they work closely with the developer community. They also listen to customers and innovate quickly in rolling our new services or enhanced features that are useful for us, making it easier for us to develop applications and services for our customers,” said Padwal.

According to Vserv, AWS’s programmable APIs are easy to use and this was one of the prime reasons as to why it chose to go with the company.

Cost competitiveness was a major reason for Vserv choosing AWS as the company periodically lowers its prices. “This is a unique practice among providers,” Padwal said.

The scenario post deployment

Usually after a company deploys a new solution, it faces some hitches before everybody gets accustomed to the systems. However, for Vserv, it was a more or less a smooth ride.

Since, AWS’s service catalog came equipped with most of the applications that it needed, Vserv didn’t have to sweat it out.“Moreover, we can easily reach out to the AWS team for support at anytime as they have been quite responsive,” Padwal said.

According to Vserv, after going with AWS, the company’s infrastructure management has been simplified as AWS took over the process of procurement and maintenance of infrastructure.

Secondly, with increased scalability, the company has become much more agile. “We are now able to respond better and in a more cost-efficient manner,” he said.

Pointing out other benefits, Padwal explained, “Besides the pay-as-you-use, on demand pricing, AWS also offers us choices such as reserved and spot instances so that we can select the most optimal pricing option to meet our changing business needs and manage costs accordingly. As a result of using AWS’ Cloud platform, our customer base has grown tremendously in a short timeframe.”

That is quite evident from the clientèle that Vserv boasts of today, a list that includes the likes of Nike, Reebok, Tata Photon, Airtel, Vodafone, Yahoo, Google, Nokia and Warner Brothers.

“For mobile publishers, our customers include Glu, Lunaforte, IndiaGames, Nazara, SnapTu, eBuddy, moneycontrol among many others,” added Padwal.

Given the service provider’s exemplary performance, Vserv plans to use more of AWS services to augment its customer offerings.

“We also plan to leverage any future new regions of AWS as it expands its presence around the world,” Padwal concluded.