Pixamba is a software company that provides digital asset management solutions for stock photography. It launched a cloud-based platform called Pixamba Media Management that allows photographers to efficiently sell and manage photos and videos. Pixamba uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its infrastructure because it provides a reliable and scalable platform at an affordable cost, allowing Pixamba to focus on its software instead of infrastructure. Prior hosting providers were more limited and costly than AWS. AWS services like EC2, S3, and CloudFront enable Pixamba to develop and maintain a sophisticated system with low costs.

1. Pixamba is a business software development and media services company providing solutions
for the international stock photography and microstock market. After introducing its first
product for microstock contributors, the ProStockMaster desktop software solution in 2006,
the company recently launched its innovative cloud computing based stock imagery and
microstock platform, called Pixamba Media Management. A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
solution running entirely on Amazon Web Services (AWS), this digital asset management service
is designed to help photographers and videographers efficiently sell photos and video through
multiple microstock and traditional stock photography agencies, and help the designers and
creatives in managing their archives of licensed stock images and video.
AWS enables Pixamba to run its digital asset management solution on a reliable and highly
available infrastructure at an affordable cost. When asked why Pixamaba selected AWS, David
Mail, CEO of Pixamaba, explains, “AWS looks to us to be a solid mature yet flexible platform
allowing us to run as many cloud-based instances as we need and store a large volume of data
at very affordable prices. AWS’s intuitive interfaces and the entire system reliability allow us to
focus on our business solution instead of taking care of physical hardware, communication lines
and IT personnel.” With AWS, Pixamaba is now able to develop and maintain a very
sophisticated system. AWS enables Pixamba’s small group of developers to reduce the time to
market for their solution without the need for dedicated IT staff.
Prior to using AWS, Pixamaba used a hosting provider, and evaluated a number of other hosting
providers for its infrastructure solution. Each of those providers had shortcomings, such as
limited storage space, and were too costly as compared to AWS. In particular, Pixamba was
attracted to AWS by the low cost of running Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual
instances, easy configurability of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), unlimited storage feature of
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and the depth of the entire AWS platform with services
such as CloudFront for content delivery.
David Mail says, “It turned out that we can run at least two AMIs for the price of 1 VPS, being in
full control of these instances and their firewalls. It is extremely important to us that AWS offers
unlimited disk storage in multiple volumes that can be attached to each instance. Even more
important, AWS offers S3 and CloudFront, allowing us to get a high volume of shared storage
that any AMI can access anytime.”

2. Today, Pixamaba’s SaaS solution runs entirely on AWS across a farm of EC2 instances hosting
the application, developed primarily using PHP and third party integration tools including
s3cmd, which is a command line tool for uploading, retrieving and managing data in Amazon S3,
and Amazon S3 PHP class, a standalone Amazon S3 REST implementation for PHP 5. Pixamba
uses Amazon S3 for storage of customer archive data and Amazon CloudFront for delivery of
Amazon S3 objects.
Using AWS has taught Pixamba several valuable lessons about cloud computing. One key
principle the team has learned is to start small, growing as demand and user traffic mandates
them to expand their capacity. Pixamba CEO shares with AWS, “We are learning that AMI
upgrade and downgrade procedures are so quick and intuitive that there is no need to oversize
your server farm. You can always add more instances if you get more load and remove them
when the load passes.” This principle has helped Pixamba optimize its deployment for
maximum resource and cost efficiency.
The success of the digital asset management solution on AWS has opened doors for the
company to explore new offerings in the cloud. For instance, the company plans to introduce
an account backup service for Pixamba customers, saving a 'snapshot' of its archive weekly on
Amazon S3. The company is also looking at the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering, which can
match the demand of its large clients representing major international corporations.
David Mail concludes, “We consider AWS as an enabling technology, which has made Pixamba
solutions possible. Our customers look for a reliable system with high availability and scalable
storage, and AWS gave us the solid platform to develop such a solution. The fact that we do not
have to run all the servers, hard disks, backups, pay for communication lines and keep IT
personnel on a payroll makes our solution affordable for customers with any budget.” The AWS
cloud computing platform has helped Pixamba to offer the media management market an
affordable yet powerful high-end solution for creative audiences worldwide.
To learn more, visit http://www.pixamba.com/