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AWS Cloud
AWS Customer Cases
- AWS Customer Case : Samsung Electronics’ Printing Solutions Division
Information on Samsung Electronics’ Printing Solutions Division
Samsung Electronics’ Printing Solutions Division (hereinafter, "Printing Solutions Division") has pursued innovations in the field of printing as declared by the brand tagline. In particular, the Division is continuously developing and growing the mobile printing technology by introducing NFC printing technology for the first time in the world. In 2014, it introduced the world's first smart MultiXpress line with a 10.1 inch Smart UX panel mounted, which was the first Android operating system within the industry. The Division has recently launched the Samsung Cloud Print service which shares and prints documents on the Cloud basis. In the recent years, the Division’s technology has successfully attracted attention in the printing market by launching products such as MX4, M4580, and M5370, to which have been applied mobile printing technology, Android operating system, Cloud print service, and Printing App Center.
An Immediate Task
In order to maximize the usability of Smart UX using the Android operating system, the Printing Solutions Division decided to build a 'Printing App Center' with a collection of apps that can be used in this multi function printer. A key feature of the Printing App Center is that it allows you to distribute a printer exclusive app available in this multi function printer or an app available in the Android operating system in real time worldwide and download it on to each printer.
The development team of the Printing Solutions Division discussed the development cost, development period, and operational method for the construction of the Printing App Center, and discovered the most rational and prompt response to each task. For the lack of an IT operation team within the development team, it was troublesome to communicate with the external operation team in the development process, and the operation team took time to newly allocate Samsung's own on premise IT resources according to the demand of the development team, thereby causing an impact on the business of the Printing Solutions Division, which supplies printing solutions across the world.
Why Amazon Web Services?
The Printing Solutions Development team reviewed several ways to provide a stable Printing App Center around the world, among which was Amazon Web Services used by Samsung Cloud Print (www.samsungcloudprint.com) for operating and managing global services. So the trust in AWS within the Division was already present. The background for the successful launch of the Printing App Center was the active support of the AWS Korean Team Solutions Architects, including technical demonstrations and architectural configuration meetings.
Printing App Center, which uses AWS, was given life through a solution of the Samsung Electronics’ Printing Solutions Division that can access and distribute apps in real time from anywhere in the world. Printing App Center is a great advantage to download, install and use app directly from the multi function printer that supports the user's familiar Android operating system.
A Benefit
In the process of developing the Printing App Center, the Printing Solutions Division was able to focus on developing core functions without worrying about the infrastructure by utilizing the AWS Cloud. As a result, the Printing App Center was launched simultaneously in the global market in line with the timeline planned, and the business utilizing it was carried out.
The Printing App Center is serviced in AWS's Virginia region and includes Amazon Route53, which is a AWS Elastic Beanstalk and DNS service that enable applications to be deployed quickly and automatically to allocate and scale resources, Amazon S3, which is a web object storage, ‘mobile HANCOM Office,” which can process Office documents by using services such as Amazon CloudFront, which is a contents distribution network, ‘Smart Service,’ which displays the current status and errors of the multi function printer while providing troubleshooting methods, and ‘Workbook Composer,’ which helps to prepare workbooks with ease, among many apps added each day.
- AWS Customer Case: SM Entertainment
Information on SM Entertainment
Headquartered in Seoul, Korea, SM Entertainment is a company that operates entertainment planning, music, film and music production, event management services, and other entertainment businesses. Founded in 1989, SM Entertainment manages popular K-POP stars such as Girls' Generation, Red Velvet and Super Junior as major projects.
An Immediate Task
SM Entertainment chose Amazon Web Services (AWS), a Cloud service that meets all the flexibility, cost, reliability and expandability required for karaoke apps and websites, and meets all of the business requirements. SM Entertainment's development team manager Kim Young Joon said, "SM Entertainment had more than 30,000 songs (including video and lyrics) to use for the everysing app, costing over $300 per song to create. SM Entertainment has concluded that Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) will be able to securely store and manage these valuable files at an affordable cost."
In February 2013, SM Entertainment completed the project in three months after the development of everysing. Everysing is currently available in Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Thailand and can be downloaded from Google Play or the SM Entertainment’s website.
Kim Young Joon, development manager of SM Entertainment, said, "The AWS Cloud service has been a great help in developing a karaoke app. Thanks to the automated process, I was not worried about managing the important files using the AWS architecture." In addition, SM Entertainment is now able to increase the number of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances as much as possible to respond to the surging traffic and reduce costs by reducing instances of the increased demand. The Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) also allowed us to extend the MySQL database, which stores information on the artists, songs, and the albums.
SM Entertainment also uses the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network to pre-cache copies of the popular content geographically close to the app users and quickly deliver them whenever needed.
In 2015, SM Entertainment, as a one-month short-term project, migrated its website and artist pages to AWS and now operates 70% of its IT environment on the AWS infrastructure and manages and optimizes web application performance on the AWS infrastructure by using the AWS Management Console.
SM Entertainment subscribes to business level AWS Support to take full advantage of technical support for application and service development projects. Kim Young Joon, development team manager at SM Entertainment, said, "We have received very prompt and detailed answers every time we asked for AWS Support, and it really helped to shorten the time of development."
The diagram below illustrates the basic infrastructure architecture of everysing and everyshot operated by SM Entertainment at AWS.
Figure 1. SM Entertainment’s Infrastructure Architecture on AWS.
Why Amazon Web Services?
The Printing Solutions Development team reviewed several ways to provide a stable Printing App Center around the world, among which was Amazon Web Services used by Samsung Cloud Print (www.samsungcloudprint.com) for operating and managing global services. So the trust in AWS within the Division was already present. The background for the successful launch of the Printing App Center was the active support of the AWS Korean Team Solutions Architects, including technical demonstrations and architectural configuration meetings.
Printing App Center, which uses AWS, was given life through a solution of the Samsung Electronics’ Printing Solutions Division that can access and distribute apps in real time from anywhere in the world. Printing App Center is a great advantage to download, install and use app directly from the multi function printer that supports the user's familiar Android operating system.
A Benefit
SM Entertainment uses AWS to build an agile and dynamic infrastructure that meets all the needs of karaoke apps, artist websites and business support systems. Since its launch, the IT infrastructure that supports everysing, which has exceeded 4 million downloads on Google Play and SM Entertainment Web sites, is 99.999% available for use.
Thanks to such performance achievements, SM Entertainment is pushing forward with the development and launch of other applications with the AWS Cloud. SM Entertainment's development team manager Kim Young Joon said, "SM Entertainment has recently launched a service called ‘everyshot’ which allows users to upload videos recorded on smartphones and share them on social media. We had 10,000 concurrent users and were able to easily extend the AWS infrastructure to give these users a great app experience." With the SM Entertainment artists' albums launched, their web page traffic would grow more than twice on average, and the surge of traffic is scalable enough to cope without compromising performance or availability. SM Entertainment is preparing to launch another application that leverages the AWS Cloud in the latter half of 2015.
SM Entertainment was able to save up to 30% of the costs of operating artist promotional pages and websites, and Kim Young Joon, the development team manager, predicts that especially for the karaoke and smartphone video apps, it would have cost more than 50% if operated by the on premise data center instead of AWS. In addition, AWS's outstanding ease of use has minimized the workforce required to maintain the newly created everysing and everyshot app service infrastructure. By enabling developers to add resources directly to AWS in less than 15 minutes, they can accelerate the development process and maximize the productivity of the technical team. App users are generally satisfied with less than 10ms of network latency.
SM Entertainment's development team manager Kim Young Joon said, "SM Entertainment is very satisfied with the AWS service overall. AWS is a very efficient infrastructure to develop applications and has a good pricing model. Lastly, SM Entertainment receives a lot of support from AWS Korea, and this has helped us optimize our AWS infrastructure."
- AWS Customer Case: ZIGBANG
Information on ZIGBANG
Established in Korea in 2011, ZIGBANG operates a real estate search service with 70 employees as of 2015. ZIGBANG is a mobile and online app that helps to find real estate properties and mainly operates around officetels, one room studios, and two room properties that are needed by the users in their 20s and 30s, and ZIGBANG’s share in the real estate app market is about 70%.
An Immediate Task
ZIGBANG reached a conclusion following a comparative analysis of the selectable infrastructure services that only the AWS’s scalability, availability, database performance, and the billing model that requires payment to the extent of use would satisfy all the needs of ZIGBANG. After experimenting with the AWS Cloud in January 2014, ZIGBANG decided to deploy their internal resources to AWS in earnest within a week. ZIGBANG is running web and mobile applications on the AWS architecture in the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region. ZIGBANG is using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances that provide scalable computing capacity, Auto Scaling to maintain the availability of web and mobile applications and scaling AWS resources on demand, Elastic Load Balancing that distributes traffic across multiple cloud instances, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) powered by the scalable messaging clusters. ZIGBANG has relied on their own database for all transaction processing before using Amazon SQS, but since Amazon SQS has been able to track and process all transactions, even if there is a problem with their own database. With Amazon SQS, they can create additional business logic, such as batch processing, by storing all transactions in queues in sequence and relieving the database load. ZIGBANG uses AWS Elastic Beanstalk to handle infrastructure functions such as capacity provisioning, load balancing, automatic resizing and application health monitoring, and easily manages and expands relational databases in the AWS Cloud using Amazon Rational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store relevant user and real estate agency information. AWS Korea provides such a significant support for ZIGBANG to optimize their AWS infrastructure and reduce the IT operating costs.
Figure 1. ZIGBANG’s Infrastructure Architecture on AWS
Why Amazon Web Services?
ZIGBANG reached a conclusion following a comparative analysis of the selectable infrastructure services that only the AWS’s scalability, availability, database performance, and the billing model that requires payment to the extent of use would satisfy all the needs of ZIGBANG. After experimenting with the AWS Cloud in January 2014, ZIGBANG decided to deploy their internal resources to AWS in earnest within a week. ZIGBANG is running web and mobile applications on the AWS architecture in the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region. ZIGBANG is using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances that provide scalable computing capacity, Auto Scaling to maintain the availability of web and mobile applications and scaling AWS resources on demand, Elastic Load Balancing that distributes traffic across multiple cloud instances, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) powered by the scalable messaging clusters. ZIGBANG has relied on their own database for all transaction processing before using Amazon SQS, but since Amazon SQS has been able to track and process all transactions, even if there is a problem with their own database. With Amazon SQS, they can create additional business logic, such as batch processing, by storing all transactions in queues in sequence and relieving the database load. ZIGBANG uses AWS Elastic Beanstalk to handle infrastructure functions such as capacity provisioning, load balancing, automatic resizing and application health monitoring, and easily manages and expands relational databases in the AWS Cloud using Amazon Rational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store relevant user and real estate agency information. AWS Korea provides such a significant support for ZIGBANG to optimize their AWS infrastructure and reduce the IT operating costs.
A Benefit
Since launching applications on AWS, ZIGBANG has had more than 5 million downloads in 4 years in the Korean market and 10 million downloads in October 2015. In addition, there are more than 5,000 real estate brokerage offices subscribing to ZIGBANG nationwide. "The AWS infrastructure has provided the agility and scalability needed to capture the domestic real estate search market. We have at least three times more downloads than other competitors’ services," said Park Young Gul, chief technology officer.
He also said, "We have also been able to optimize our costs by not investing in infrastructure, which allowed us to minimize risk in the early stages of development."
ZIGBANG is operating at 99.999% of availability on the AWS infrastructure, and service issues experienced with the existing Cloud providers have improved. This result is another key factor that helped to strengthen their leading position in the domestic market. "Users are very sensitive to the service downtime and react almost instantly in the event of any system failure. The use of AWS is very satisfactory with AWS's outstanding reliability, performance and manageability," said Park Young Gul, chief technology officer.
Today's ZIGBANG’s technology team can better focus on developing apps or adding value to the company instead of pursuing low level tasks such as the infrastructure management. They are planning to use the AWS services to improve their ability to use search engines and data analytics using a well constructed AWS infrastructure.
- AWS Customer Case: Gamevil
Information on Gamevil
Gamevil is one of the leading domestic mobile game companies listed on KOSDAQ, and is a mobile game developer and distributor that releases its games in various countries with its publishing know-how accumulated over many years. They have a wide range of popular mobile games such as 'Fshing Master' on Amazon Web Services, 'Pro Baseball' and 'Genonia’ among the mobile game portfolio while providing numerous social network games. Currently, Gamevil has successfully entered the world market and is providing games to users in various countries such as France, Germany, Australia and Hong Kong, among others, drawing more than 50% of the total revenue from overseas.
An Immediate Task
Gamevil considered a variety of ways to build the IT infrastructure needed to enter the global market. Initially, they thought about purchasing the equipment and building the data center directly, but the huge amount of initial investment and maintenance costs that they faced was a problem, and their overseas business was more uncertain than their domestic business. They believed that they could not afford the risks with the traditional form of the infrastructure. Kim Young Ho, director of Gamevil, said as follows being reminiscent of the time of building the data center.
"There are some cases of providing overseas services by operating a data center in Korea, but I do not think it's a good match for a mobile game where the response speed is its life. We also considered building a data center overseas, but we needed such a large number of data centers to cover a variety of areas, including North America, Europe and Asia. If we proceeded like that, it would have taken so much time starting with the complicated contracting process."
Mobile games are not only hard to predict, but also often require sudden performance improvements during operation. When hardware is upgraded or replaced in order to cope with traffic increase, it takes several days to be short and several months to be long. Kim Young Ho said that he could not help but consider the risk in such cases.
"If your IT infrastructure is not ready in advance, there are a lot of cases where you can not handle the rapidly growing traffic. However, it is not always possible to prepare such a large scale infrastructure in advance. Unfortunately, these infrastructure replacements and upgrades take a significant amount of time and will have a bad business impact while the service is paused."
Why Amazon Web Services?
AWS has 9 regional and 42 edge locations worldwide in total, enabling you to quickly deploy and service applications and content worldwide with just a few clicks. As they can quickly and easily increase or decrease the infrastructure at any time, they have the capabilities and services that developers need to build a global gaming environment as well as respond quickly to the rapidly changing traffic. Even now, these features are continuously added.
A Benefit
At present, Gamevil has implemented a game and update patch download service via Amazon CloudFront to provide a pleasant gaming environment to their users all over the world. By deploying applications in multiple regions, users around the world can enjoy optimized performance in a comfortable environment. Director Kim Young Ho described this as follows.
"Thanks to Route 53's Latency Based Routing feature, we were able to connect the end user's request to the region with the fastest response speed in the area, and still provide the same service without changing the domain."
In addition, the Provisioned IOPS feature allows you to allocate Amazon EBS with a certain level of I/O performance, and the I/O performance specified is maintained until the corresponding EBS volume is turned off. Director Kim Young Ho said as follows.
"A database plays such a critical role in most services. With AWS's Provisioned IOPS capability, we were able to maintain I/O performance despite heavy traffic. Periodic monitoring also allowed us to allocate the right amount of provisioned IOPS, and it was also possible to maintain consistent performance using the EBS-optimized Instance."
Director Kim Young Ho, who built the game hosting infrastructure with Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon Route53, Provisioned IOPS of Amazon EBS, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudFront and Elastic Load Balancing, summarized the advantages of AWS as follows.
"The strength of the AWS Cloud is that it allows users to directly control services to fine levels and provide a variety of modules. It not only supports most of the features that their customers want, but also improves the competitiveness of their business by enhancing individual functions and services."
- AWS Customer Case: Mirae Asset Global Investments
Mirae Asset Global Investments Introduces the First Cloud-based Web Server System as a Domestic Financial Company
"The maintenance of web service facilities such as server, network, database, and security has become unified, thereby reducing annual management costs by more than 50%."
- Kim Wan-kyu, Executive Director, IT Division, Mirae Asset Global Investments
Mirae Asset Global Investments has been communicating with online and mobile customers through more than ten web sites, and as the importance of the online services has increased, they have decided to introduce AWS cloud services, which are considered to be innovative technologies.
The group’s global website, retirement research institute’s website, and Mirae Asset Global Investments’ overseas subsidiary websites, among others, are using AWS and the domestic websites related to disclosure and standard price calculation will be introduced at the time of reorganization. Mirae Asset Global Investments expects that its customers will experience a significantly improved access speed since the introduction of the service, and according to their own simulation results, the connection speed is improved by about 50% for domestic users and about 300% for overseas users. With the improved web service environment following the introduction of AWS service, they have been able to provide more diverse and higher quality investment information to the domestic and foreign investors.
- AWS Customer Case: NEXON
Nexon Offers All Types of Games from PC to Mobile Through AWS Cloud
"They are using AWS across all areas from game development to publishing. AWS is a great partner for Nexon's growth."
- Ryu Jung-hoon, head of Nexon’s IT Division (September 2015)
Nexon used AWS before AWS Korea was conceived and initially used AWS to service mobile games to the overseas. Currently, it is used not only for global services of mobile games but also for domestic services. They also use AWS for PC games. In addition to game publishing, Nexon is working on the most efficient way to use AWS, starting with AWS from the development stage, and doing big data analysis with Amazon Redshift. Because of the nature of the game's uncertainty of success, AWS's billing model, which uses as much resilient infrastructure as it grows and shrinks, is just the right model for a game business with a short lifecycle. Nexon is Korea's premier game company that has developed a free to play business model.
- AWS Customer Case: HANA TOUR
Hana Tour Invites Tourists From All Over the World to Korea with AWS
"Building a website with AWS enabled us to resiliently respond to expanding infrastructure and respond quickly to traffic from anywhere in the world."
- Song Ho-sung, Hana Tour IT Team Lead (December 2015)
Hana Tour is carrying out events such as production and distribution of cultural products and performing instant surging events such as concert ticket sales, running a global website to guide tourist products, and providing services to tourists around the world.
Hana Tour needed a highly scalable infrastructure that exists around the globe to respond to high traffic and to provide a uniform, high quality website experience for tourists around the world. Hana Tour has built a website that uses various services provided by AWS such as EC2, RDS, S3, CloudFront, among others, to build an infrastructure that can flexibly respond to how much ever traffic is spreading around the world by quickly expanding the computing capacity.
It is utilized as a useful infrastructure resource for IT services to support global business of Hana Tour, equipped with a worldwide travel product distribution network, and is currently being used in the Americas and Europe, among others.
Hana Tour is a leader in the travel industry in Korea and aims to become a global No. 1 cultural tourism group in 2020 by expanding its travel business centric business area into cultural product production and distribution business.
- AWS Customer Case: SOGANG UNIVERSITY
Sogang University Innovates Computer Practice Curriculum Through AWS Cloud
"Students who took this class were proud to be advanced developers by leveraging AWS Cloud services."
- Kim Ji-hwan, Professor, Department of Computer Engineering, Sogang University - (May 2015)
Sogang University Computer Engineering Department has added a new curriculum to system programming classes with the support of the AWS Educate program. Over 100 students have implemented projects that use Amazon EC2, S3, EMR, and DynamoDB to develop the real world, cloud-based apps and empower them.
The cloud-based hands-on experience and learning content helped the AWS Educate program to provide a variety of hands-on curriculum for faculty, giving students an opportunity to gain professionalism for immediate application upon graduation.
Sogang University is one of the major private universities founded in 1960 and has become a leading university in Korea as a research and liberal arts college
