10 Pro Tips for scaling your startup from 0-10M users by Pieter Kemps

1. 10 Pro Tips for scaling your
startup from 0-10M users
Pieter Kemps
Head of Startup & VC, Asia
@P_Kemps
@AWSCloudSEAsia

2. What do these Thai startups…

3. …have in common with these global startups

4. “AAmmaazzoonn WWeebb SSeerrvviicceess is probably the most
important thing that has happened to mobile
and web app developers that the press just
misses. Jeff Bezos has accidentally or maybe
on purpose powered a whole generation of
applications.”
Steve Blank

5. An Exploration of AngelList Data
The better the company, the more likely it is to use AWS
Source: http://codingvc.com/which-technologies-do-startups-use-an-exploration-of-angellist-data

6. So when do you get
started?

8. Product Development
MVP
Time
Scale

9. Iterative Product Development
MVP
Time
Scale

10. Iterative Product Development
Time
Scale
Started: burbn, location-based mobile
app. Photo sharing is just one feature
Now: re-written as
photo app. Sold to FB
for 1bn

11. Iterative Product Development
Time
Scale
Started: odeo, site to create & share
podcasts
Now: micro-blogging,
500M users, >10Bn
valuation, IPO

13. Pro Tip #1
Learn early, learn often
http://www.slideshare.net/gueste94e4c/dropbox-startup-lessons-learned-3836587

15. Pro Tip #2
Not launching = Painful
Not Learning = Fatal
http://www.slideshare.net/gueste94e4c/dropbox-startup-lessons-learned-3836587

16. “Code something in a day and release it”
AWS Elastic Beanstalk

17. Pro Tip #3
“Keep the main thing the main thing”
http://www.slideshare.net/gueste94e4c/dropbox-startup-lessons-learned-3836587

18. “Fortunately, we spent almost all our effort
on making an elegant, simple product that
‘just works’ and making users happy”
Drew Houston, Founder, Dropbox

19. AWS = building blocks

21. http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/airbnb/
Pro Tip #4
Anytime you can use an AWS service to
solve a problem, do it
so that you don’t have to solve that problem yourself

22. API
Monitoring Identity & Access
OpsWork CloudTrail
Storage
S3 EBS Glacier Storage
Gateway
Human Interaction
Support
Interaction
Web Console
Command Line
Regions Availability Zones Edge Locations
Foundation
Services
Networking
VPC Direct
Connect
ELB Route53
Databases
RDS Dynamo ElastiCache RedShift
Content Delivery
CloudFront
Analytics
EMR DataPipeline Kinesis
Compute
EC2
WorkSpaces
AWS Global Infrastructure
Deployment &
Management
IAM Federation
CloudWatch
Deployment & Management
BeanStalk Cloud
Formation
Libraries, SDK’s
AWS Global Infrastructure
Application
Services
Application Services
SES SNS SQS Elastic
Transcoder
CloudSearch SWF AppStream

23. Low-cost, fast development on AWS
Time
Scale
Scenario
Small team with initial idea for Mobile app
3 months to get to launch
Unknown customer/problem/solution
No cash….

24. Dev / Test Environment
Time
Scale
Average Spend
$0
p/m

25. Amazon EC2
Elastic Load
Balancing
Elastic
Virtual Servers
in the cloud
Dynamic traffic
distribution
Amazon
Route 53
Domain Name System
(DNS) web service
Availability
Zone B
Availability
Zone A
Amazon RDS
Managed relational
database service
DBA

27. http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/flipboard
Pro Tip #5
Focus less on mySQL administration, more
on scaling out the rest of your services

28. Alpha Release
Time
Scale
Average Spend
$15
p/m

29. Beta Release / MVP
Time
Scale
Average Spend
$235
p/m

30. Getting to MVP for $250
Time
Scale
Total Spend to MVP
$250
$0 $15 $235
• 3 months dev/test/release
• Serving Beta customers
• Ready for full production
and scale

31. How do you scale to
your 1st 10M users?

32. http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/flipboard
Pro Tip #6
Focus on distributed services and fault
tolerant systems from Day 1

33. Production 1.0
Architecture

34. Auto Scaling
Automated scaling
EC2
Actual
of EC2 capacity

35. February 2012
• >70 million users
• Total funding: $762.5M
• $5B valuation
http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/5/21/pinterest-architecture-update-18-million-visitors-10x-growth.html
Now

36. Pro Tip #7
Use Auto-scaling
http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/12/12/pinterest-cut-costs-from-54-to-20-per-hour-by-automatically.html

45. Auto-scaling at Pinterest
Switch off 40% of resources
between peak & off-peak
automatically

46. Pro Tip #8
Use “Reserved Instances”
http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/12/12/pinterest-cut-costs-from-54-to-20-per-hour-by-automatically.html

47. AWS offers multiple purchasing models
On-Demand
Pay for compute
capacity by the hour
with no long-term
commitments
For spiky workloads,
or to define needs
Reserved
Make a low, one-time
payment and receive a
significant discount on
the hourly charge
For committed
utilization
Spot
Bid for unused capacity,
charged at a Spot Price
which fluctuates based
on supply and demand
For time-insensitive or
transient workloads
Free Tier
Get Started on AWS
with free usage & no
commitment
For POCs and
getting started

48. • Auto-scaling – automated shut down of 40% of instances off-peak
• Reserved Instances – to save on EC2 for base workload
Savings/h: 71%

49. Production 1.0
Architecture

50. Production 1.0 Architecture
Well-designed, 2 Tier architecture
Highly Available due to Multiple Availability Zone
Load Balancing & Auto-Scaling for full scalability
Fully managed Database included
Capable of serving >10K-100Ks users
BUT…

51. Production 1.0 Architecture
Wasted server capacity for static content
Reliability and durability are not yet optimal
End-user experience could be improved thru offloading &
caching

52. Let’s add
Simple Storage Service (S3) & CloudFront
to optimize the end-user experience
Amazon S3
Internet scale storage via API
Images
Videos
Files
Binaries
Snapshots
Amazon CloudFront
distribute content
globally

53. Production 1.1
Architecture

54. Production 1.1 Architecture
Well-designed, 2 Tier architecture
Highly Available due to Multiple Availability Zone
Load Balancing & Auto-Scaling for full scalability
Fully managed Database included
Static content stored in durable, consistent way
Improved end-user experience through CDN
Capable of serving >100K-1M+ users
BUT…

55. Production 1.1 Architecture
You are now at scale with lots of data…
…and need to optimize customer
experience…continuously.
But how and where?

56. http://nerds.airbnb.com/redshift-performance-cost/
Pro Tip #9
Look into all possible ways to improve
product and user experience
Hint: this involves lots of analytics behind the scene

57. Let’s add
Big Data
for analytics of web, mobile, gaming, and log data
Amazon EMR
(Elastic Map Reduce)
AWS Data
Pipeline
Hosted Hadoop
framework
Move data among AWS
services and on-premises
data sources
Amazon Redshift
Petabyte-scale
data warehouse service

58. “Redshift is up to 20x faster than Hive /
Hadoop and 76% cheaper. Anyone with a
little SQL background can start to use it
immediately”
“Using Amazon Redshift has enabled the
company to perform more agile analytics
while saving costs.”

59. “Amazon Redshift has proven to be a good
solution for Wego as it saved us the hassle of
managing our own Hadoop cluster in-house and
greatly expanded our ability to tie together
massive data sets to perform useful analysis. ”
“Initially we used Amazon Redshift as a data mart
for the data science team. Now, it is increasingly
used for production data mart tasks such as
providing our marketing department with fresh
data to make informed decisions and automatically
optimize our advertising

60. Production 1.2
Architecture

61. Production 1.2 Architecture
Well-designed, 2 Tier architecture
Highly Available due to Multiple Availability Zone
Load Balancing & Auto-Scaling for full scalability
Static content stored in durable, consistent way
Improved end-user experience through CDN
Big Data analytics built in for continuous optimization
Capable of serving >1m-10M+ users

62. http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/flipboard
Pro Tip #10
Control your costs as your user base grows

63. Minimizing Costs while scaling to 100M users

65. Sign up now:
aws.amazon.com/activate

66. Thank You
Pieter Kemps
Head of Startup & VC, Asia
@P_Kemps
@AWSCloudSEAsia