1. Running a Lean Startup with AWS
H-Farm, 8 March 2012
Ebook Distribution
over the clouds
Giacomo D'Angelo
Luca Razzano
Simplicissimus Book Farm S.R.L.

2. Simplicissimus Market
"We enable everyone to play the Digital Publishing Game"

3. Ebook Distribution Platform
Market share:
○ 20% in value (in Italy)
○ 30% in volumes (in Italy)
Highlights:
○ launched in Q4 2009, 280 publishers, price
leader
○ integrated with 28 stores global and local,
included Apple IBookStore and Amazon Kindle
Store

4. Publishing Services over Stealth
UltimaKiosk is the Digital Newstand where
everyone can browse, purchase and read
magazines, newspaper and comics.
Every publisher can be on IOs and Android
tablets and smartphones
Narcissus is the Self Publishing Community
and MarketPlace connected to global and local
stores.
Every author can play as an entrepreneur
thanks to Narcissus.

5. Why SBF choose AWS
As every Internet Startup:
1. We have a small team:
○ Flexibility for daily operations (test, deploy, dev., backup)
○ Automatic disaster recovery strategy
2. We need to scale:
○ AWS provide an elastic environment to fits our needs
progressively (bandwidth, computation, storage, etc...)
3. We need to focus on innovation:
○ Reduced Time to market for new experiments/projects
○ Cross technology platform / Language independent
○ The market is unknown: we need to experiment and
adapt quickly

6. SBF Architecture on AWS
○ Web Servers are on EC2 reserved instances
○ The batch processing servers are on EC2 ondemand istances
(Processes: EBook validation, watermarking, automatic
conversion between formats, sync engine between estores,
sales reports generation across estores)
○ Load Balancer + Auto Scaling + CloudWatch to manage the
peaks of traffic
○ Stealth works on a PostgreSQL DB on dedicated instances
○ All Ebook covers are stored on S3 and delivered by
CloudFront
○ All Ebook files are stored on S3 (PDF, EPub, MOBI, NITF, PDF
Bundle)
○ The security model and the fullfillment process of the
purchased Ebooks are based on S3

7. General Recommendations
○ Begin using different and independent small instances in
at least 2 regions instead of big monolith instances
○ Use EC2 1-year o 3-year long term plans if you can
○ Use CloudWatch to size your instances based on your
needs and budget
○ Use S3 as storage for all digital contents (security and
bandwith)
○ Use CloudFront for delivery all your static resources
(media files) of your high-traffic websites

8. Thanks!
Q & A, if you want :)
Link to the presentation: http://slidesha.re/SBFDistrAWS
KEEP IN TOUCH WITH US!
Giacomo D'Angelo
giacomo.dangelo@simplicissimus.it / @giacomodangelo
Luca Razzano
luca.razzano@simplicissimus.it / @luca776
Simplicissimus Book Farm S.R.L.