Flipboard at AWS Summit 2014

/ April 10, 2014

About two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking at Amazon’s AWS Summit 2014. During Andy Jassy’s keynote presentation, I discussed how we use Amazon Web Services in an efficient, performant, and cost-effective way.

When people think of Flipboard, what most often comes to mind is our application design – the beautiful, flippable reading experience millions of readers enjoy every day. What’s less well known is all of the data and serving architecture that goes into delivering that beautiful experience and ensuring it’s fast.

The following presentation just touches on the basics of what we do within AWS. To deliver you a personalized, fast, and beautiful experience, our architecture scales to thousands of nodes and petabytes of data.

So far, we’ve been able to monitor, build, and scale our core systems in AWS with a team of just three. Through this blog, we’re going to show you some of the tips and tricks we’ve picked up in scaling out to 100 million readers – but as we grow even more, we’re looking to add more great ops folks to our team. So, if you’re excited about helping us with the challenge of scaling well beyond where we are today, get in touch!

Special thanks to Eric and Christel for their support and for Erin Traudt of Amazon Web Services helping me rehearse – and making sure I didn’t fall on my face!

by Joey Parsons