10 Pro Tips for Scaling Your Startup from 0-10M Users by Pieter Kemps

1. AWS Cloud Kata for Start-Ups and Developers
Hong
Kong
10 Pro Tips for scaling your
startup from 0-10M users
Pieter Kemps
Head of Startup & VC, Asia
@P_Kemps

2. “Amazon Web Services 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

3. AWS Cloud Kata for Start-Ups and Developers
AWS powering a whole generation of startups

4. AWS Cloud Kata for Start-Ups and Developers
AWS powering the top Game Developers

5. AWS Cloud Kata for Start-Ups and Developers
AWS powering Hong Kong

6. AWS Cloud Kata for Start-Ups and Developers
“Using AWS Cenique was able to roll out a highly scalable IntelliSense analytics platform in to different geographical regions effortlessly”
ShyleshKaruvath, CoFounder& CEO

7. AWS Cloud Kata for Start-Ups and Developers
"AWS helped us accelerate our development and allowed us to go to market on a global basis much faster."
MrAlvin Hung, Founder & CEO

8. Which Technologies Do Startups Use? An Exploration of AngelListData

9. AWS Cloud Kata for Start-Ups and Developers
Hong Kong
What do these startups like about AWS?

10. 1.Backbone of Giants
•Level the playing field
•Democratize security, Enterprise-grade architectures, and global footprint
•10 regions, 26 Availability Zones, 52 Edge locations incl. Hong Kong

11. These HK startups … are getting the same… as these companies:
DURABILITY
SECURITY
SCALABILITY
RELIABILITY
AFFORDABILITY

12. 1.Backbone of Giants
2.Developer Centric
•AWS is fully focused on developers
•Open, flexible, many languages & tools
•Many services & rich API
•Infrastructure as Code -automate everything

14. Develop your Android Apps for Amazon AppStore
•Available in HK & China
•Go regional: ANZ, ID, MY, SG, VN, TH
•Go Global: 234 countries
•Amazon has >200m customer credit cards on file
•1-Click payment system drives high conversions
•Kindle Fire users convert 386% higher than Google (Flurry, Feb 2012)
•75% of Android apps work without any need for customization
Distribute
Monetize
Develop

15. 1.Backbone of Giants
2.Developer Centric
3.Easy to get Started

16. Easy to start with Automated Deployment
AWS Elastic Beanstalk

17. AWS Cloud Kata for Start-Ups and Developers
Hong Kong
So when do you get started?

19. on
DAY 1

20. Product Development
MVP
Time
Scale

21. Iterative Product Development
MVP
Time
Scale

22. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

31. AWS = building blocks

33. Total # AirBnBGuests
9M
Up by over 5 million since the beginning of the 2013

34. 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

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

36. 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….

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

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

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

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

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

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

44. How do you scale to your 1st10M users?

45. 1. Dev & Test
2. Alpha Release
3. Beta Release

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

47. Production 1.0
Architecture

48. Auto Scaling
Actual
EC2
Automated scaling ofEC2 capacity

49. One of the fastest growing sites in history. Cites AWS for making it possible to handle growth and scale
http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/5/21/pinterest-architecture-update-18-million-visitors-10x-growth.html

50. EC2 Instance Hours
S3 Storage Volume
UP 293%
UP 1700%
•80 millionobjects stored in S3
•410 terabytes of user data
•70 master databases
•150 EC2 instances in the web tier
•90 instances for in-memory caching
•35 instances used for internal purposes
•Elastic Load Balancing
•Elastic MapReduce(Hadoop)

51. February 2013
48.7 million users globally
Raised $200M (Total = $338M)
$2.5B valuation
How do we keep costs down as we scale up?

52. 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

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

62. 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

63. 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

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

65. Production 1.0
Architecture

66. 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…

67. 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

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

69. Production 1.2
Architecture

70. Production 1.2 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…

71. Production 1.2 Architecture
You are now at scale with lots of data…
…and need to optimize customer experience…continuously.
But how and where?

72. 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

73. 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

74. Foursquare…
Founded in 2009
112M in Venture Capital
33 million users
1.3 million businesses using the service
…generates a lot of Data
3.5 billion check-ins
15M+ venues,
Terabytes of log data

75. Benefits of EMR
Ease-of-Use
“We have decreased the processing time for urgent data-analysis”
Flexibility
To deal with changing requirements & dynamically expand reporting clusters
Costs
“We have reduced our analytics costs by over 50%”

76. Production 1.3 Architecture

77. Production 1.3 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

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

79. Minimizing Costs while scaling to 100M users

80. AWS Cloud Kata for Start-Ups and Developers
Hong
Kong
Thank You
Pieter Kemps
Head of Startup & VC, Asia
@P_Kemps