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AWS and Zoom Extend Strategic Relationship

AWS continues to be Zoom’s preferred cloud provider to seamlessly grow its core video meeting platform and innovate new customer experiences using AWS’s unmatched portfolio of services

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 30, 2020-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZM) has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider. The multi-year agreement extends the longstanding relationship between the two companies, enabling Zoom to rapidly scale its service on the world’s leading cloud, rise to the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, and deliver reliable services and continuous innovation for its expanding base of corporate and individual customers. Zoom will continue to leverage AWS’s global infrastructure and unmatched portfolio of services – including capabilities in compute, storage, content distribution, and security – to create a seamless, secure extension of its data centers. In addition, AWS and Zoom are collaborating to develop new solutions for Zoom’s enterprise users, leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS to integrate Zoom services with Amazon devices and capabilities to make it easier for organizations to run hybrid office and remote work models.

AWS has supported Zoom since 2011, and earlier this year when the COVID-19 pandemic began impacting businesses, schools, and governments around the world, Zoom expanded its relationship with AWS to keep up with surging demand as hundreds of millions of new Zoom participants began to use the platform for everything from online education to business meetings to social gatherings to exercise classes. Over the past year, Zoom has grown on AWS to accommodate an increase from 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to more than 300 million a day regularly since April 2020. Beginning in February 2020, engineering teams from AWS and Zoom worked around the clock and across remote locations to securely and reliably meet the needs of this vast, globally dispersed user community, adding tens of thousands of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances (virtual servers) to Zoom’s overall capacity, even adding thousands of instances in a day as usage demanded.

With AWS, Zoom is ready to meet customer demand with low latency anywhere in the world, while continuously delivering new features that improve the Zoom user experience. Today, leveraging AWS, Zoom is able to seamlessly scale with global demand for its services. Zoom now provides video conferencing technology to more than 130,000 schools globally at no charge, as well as millions of families and individuals, in addition to the company’s traditional enterprise-scale users – businesses, governments, healthcare and educational institutions, and other large organizations.

Tied to its sudden growth, Zoom also faced sharply increased demand for customer service over the past nine months as new users adopted its platform. AWS provided Zoom with over 1,000 Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktops to help the company manage an unprecedented increase in demand for help desk support while its employees work remotely during the pandemic. AWS also provided additional cloud infrastructure and security monitoring support to help Zoom successfully stream major events more securely, including nationally-televised sporting and entertainment events, standing up a dedicated threat intelligence team to monitor Zoom’s AWS environments during the events.

Zoom and AWS are also making it increasingly easy and secure for  businesses to employ hybrid workplace models  where employees move seamlessly between home and the office. For instance, Zoom will be integrating its video meeting service into select Amazon Echo Show devices (Amazon’s Alexa-enabled smart display), as well as incorporating Alexa for Business features, including voice control, into its Zoom Rooms service. In addition, Zoom and AWS are deepening their collaboration to reimagine the future of online communication, leveraging AWS’s unmatched portfolio of services, with capabilities in machine learning, threat monitoring and response, encryption, and data visualization, to innovate new features, products, and services for Zoom users.

“Faced with unprecedented global demand this past year, we’ve been able to handle it in significant part by running the substantial majority of our cloud-based workloads on our preferred cloud provider, AWS, and relying on AWS’s performance and scalability,” said Eric S. Yuan, CEO of Zoom. “Looking forward, we will continue to innovate alongside AWS to reinvent virtual collaboration and deliver secure and exciting experiences for our customers.”

“COVID-19 changed everything for Zoom, putting demands on the company to meet the video conferencing needs of hundreds of millions of new participants around the globe, and AWS was there from the beginning to ensure Zoom could scale to meet these new requirements virtually overnight,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. “When organizations build on AWS – as Zoom has done since 2011 – they transform their business, expanding and innovating much faster. Together, Zoom and AWS have delivered great experiences for new Zoom users around the world, and we look forward to using the cloud to develop new ways to help the world communicate.”

About Amazon Web Services

For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit  aws.amazon.com .

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit  amazon.com/about  and follow  @AmazonNews . 

View source version on  businesswire.com :  https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201130005189/en/

Amazon.com, Inc. Media Hotline [email protected] www.amazon.com/pr

Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

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Zoom powered by AWS is more than meetings.

It helps keep your teams, projects, and minds aligned – no matter who they are, where they are, or how they connect. Find Zoom on the AWS Marketplace for a consolidated purchasing and billing experience.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services across global data centers. Millions of customers—including fast-growing startups, large enterprises, and government agencies—are using AWS to help lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster. Together, Zoom and AWS provide:

• Zoom in AWS Marketplace : Simplified purchasing of Zoom platform products with the added benefit of using an existing AWS spending commitment.
• Aligned sales teams: AWS and Zoom account teams can collaborate to help provide a cohesive customer experience.
• Joint product innovation: Product and engineering teams from both companies are focused on developing new industry, infrastructure, and AI solutions.

Zoom products now available through the AWS Marketplace include:

• Zoom Workplace — Zoom’s AI-powered collaboration platform including  Zoom AI Companion, Team Chat, Phone, Meetings, Whiteboard, and more!
• Zoom Contact Center — an omnichannel contact center solution for small-to-large businesses!

Talk to your Zoom Account Executive to learn how you can foster limitless human connection with Zoom.

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How Amazon grew an awkward side project into AWS, a behemoth that’s now 4 times bigger than its original shopping business

If you have touched your phone or computer today, you very likely have been touched by a vast business few outside the technology world are aware of. Maybe you’ve checked the Wall Street Journal or MarketWatch, traded a stock on Robinhood, bet on a football game through DraftKings , or posted on Pinterest or Yelp; ordered treats for Fido on Chewy or treats for yourself on DoorDash; submitted an expense report on Workday or made plans for the evening via Tinder, OkCupid, or Hinge. 

If so, you did it with the help of Amazon Web Services. The less glamorous sibling to Amazon’s operations in e-commerce, streaming video, and smart devices, AWS is no less ubiquitous, deploying millions of computers worldwide, humming away somewhere in the cloud.

For all those AWS customers the on-demand cloud computing platform isn’t just another vendor. They rely on it so heavily that it resembles a public utility—taken for granted, but essential to keep the machinery humming. In the past 12 months each of the companies mentioned above has stated in Securities and Exchange Commission filings that they “would be adversely impacted” if they lost their AWS service. Hundreds more companies— Netflix , Zoom , Intuit , Caesars Entertainment—have reported the same risk factor to the SEC in the past year. By the way, the SEC uses AWS. (So does Fortune .)

And those are but the tiniest fraction of AWS customers. AWS—initially run by Andy Jassy, who went on to succeed Jeff Bezos as Amazon’s CEO—won’t say how many customers it has, only that it provides computing power, data storage, and software to millions of organizations and individuals. Now, even as Amazon lays off a reported 10,000 workers, Wall Street analysts expect another blowout performance from its web services division. That’s probably why few if any of those staffing cuts will affect this relatively recession-proof part of Bezos’s empire. (Amazon won’t say how many of its 1.5 million employees work for AWS.)

For years AWS has brought in more profit than all other divisions of Amazon combined, usually by a wide margin. AWS’s operating profit last year, $18.5 billion, was nearly three times the operating profit reported by the rest of the company ($6.3 billion). AWS pulled in $58.7 billion of revenue in this year’s first nine months; if it were independent, it would easily rank in the Fortune 100.  

How did this offshoot of an online retailer come to rule the lucrative cloud-computing industry, towering over tech giants such as Microsoft and Google , which might have seemed better positioned to dominate?

AWS’s ascent is so unlikely that it demands an explanation. It reveals the power of a truly iconoclastic culture that, while at times ruthless, ultimately breeds innovation and preserves top talent by encouraging entrepreneurship.

The best-known origin story of AWS is that it started when Amazon had some spare computer capacity and decided to rent it out to other companies. That story won’t die, but it isn’t true. The real story traces a circuitous path that could easily have ended in a ditch. It’s grounded in a philosophy that still guides AWS’s progress.

“To me, it’s the concept of insurgents versus incumbents,” says Adam Selipsky, who became AWS’s CEO last year when his predecessor, Jassy, took over as Amazon CEO. Selipsky, 56, speaks quietly, conveying an understated intensity. “One thing that I think is really important, that we intentionally worry about all the time,” he says, is that “we continue to keep the customer need dancing in front of our eyes at all times.”

The real story of the AWS insurgency began with Amazon’s innovative responses to two problems. First: By the early 2000s, Amazon—still known mainly as an online bookseller—had built from scratch one of the world’s biggest websites, but adding new features had become frustratingly slow. Software engineering teams were spending 70% of their time building the basic elements any project would require—most important, a storage system and an appropriate computing infrastructure. Building those elements for projects at Amazon scale was hard, and all that work merely produced a foundation on which to build the cool new customer-pleasing features Amazon was seeking. Every project team was performing the same drudgery. Bezos and other Amazon managers started calling it “undifferentiated heavy lifting” and complaining that it produced “muck.” 

In response, Selipsky recalls, company leaders began to think, “Let’s build a shared layer of infrastructure services that all these teams can rely on, and none of them have to spend time on general capabilities like storage, compute capabilities, databases.” Amazon’s leaders didn’t think of it as an internal “cloud”—the term wasn’t widely used in the tech world yet—but that’s what it was.

The second problem involved other websites wanting to add links to Amazon products on their own pages. For example, a website about cooking might recommend a kitchen scale and include a link to the Amazon.com page for the product. Amazon was all for it, and would send them a bit of code they could plug into their site; if someone bought the product through the link, the site owner earned a fee. But as the program grew, cranking out bits of code for every affiliate site became overwhelming, and those affiliates’ website developers wanted to create their own links and product displays instead of the ones Amazon sent them. So in 2002 Amazon offered them a more advanced piece of software, enabling them to create far more creative displays. The new software was complicated. Users had to write software rather than just plug it in. Yet thousands of developers loved it immediately.

When Amazon launched a fuller, free version of the software building block a few months later, it enabled anyone, not just affiliates, to incorporate Amazon features into their sites. The surprise: A lot of the downloads were going to Amazon’s own software engineers. The building block turned out to be a proof of concept for the labor-lightening innovations that Amazon itself was looking for.

A picture was emerging. Amazon desperately needed to free its software developers from creating muck. Developers everywhere, not only its own, were starving for new tools that did just that. “We very quickly figured out that external developers had exactly the same problems as internal developers at Amazon,” Selipsky says.

But was that a business for Amazon? During a 2003 offsite at Bezos’s house, the company’s top managers decided that it could be. That decision was the turning point, especially significant because it could so easily have gone the other way. Amazon’s customers were consumers who bought “new, used, refurbished, and collectible items,” as the company told investors at the time. Why would anyone imagine this company could build a business selling technology services to software developers?

The decision to plunge ahead revealed a subtle distinction that outsiders didn’t understand. The world saw Amazon as an online retailer, but the company’s leaders never thought of it that way. They thought of it as “a technology company that had simply applied its technology to the retail space first,” Jassy later told Harvard Business School professors who were writing a case study. For that kind of company, AWS looked like a promising bet.

Coming out of the 2003 offsite, Jassy’s job was to build a team and develop AWS. He wrote a proposal for it as a cloud-computing business. The document, one of the famous six-pagers used at Amazon’s executive meetings instead of PowerPoint (which is banned), reportedly went through 31 revisions.

It took three years before AWS went live. In 2005 Jassy hired Selipsky from a software firm to run marketing, sales, and support, Selipsky recalls: “Amazon called and told me there was this initiative for something about turning the guts of Amazon inside out, but other companies could use it.” AWS’s first service, for data storage, “was such a novel concept that it was even hard to explain and hard for me to understand,” he says.

Wall Street didn’t get it. “I have yet to see how these investments are producing any profit,” a Piper Jaffray analyst said in 2006. “They’re probably more of a distraction than anything else.”

The rest of the world didn’t get it either. “I cannot tell you the number of times I got asked, with a quizzical look on people’s faces, ‘But what does this have to do with selling books?’ ” Selipsky recalls. “The answer, of course, was: AWS has nothing to do with selling books. But the technology we use to sell books has everything to do with AWS and what we can offer customers.” Those customers were software developers, an entirely new target market that baffled outsiders.

AWS was prepared for that reaction. One of Amazon’s principles reads in part: “As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

On the day in March 2006 when AWS finally launched its inaugural service—S3, for Simple Storage Service—Selipsky was at a trade show in Santa Clara, Calif., “in a windowless, internet-less conference room,” as he describes it, unable to learn how the launch was going. At day’s end he and a colleague ran outside to call Seattle for news. 

“We were told that 12,000 developers had signed up,” he says, a note of marvel still in his voice. “On the first day. It was just amazing.”

Five months later AWS launched its other foundational service, EC2, for Elastic Compute Cloud, which was also instantly popular. The revolution had begun. Instead of raising millions of dollars to buy servers and build data centers, startups could now get online with a credit card, and pay a monthly bill for just the computing power and storage they used. If their new app was a hit, they could immediately engage all the cloud services that they needed. If it bombed, they weren’t stuck with rooms of junk equipment. As a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and early AWS customer told Wired in 2008: “Infrastructure is the big guys’ most powerful asset. This levels the field.”

In response to that historic shift, AWS’s potential competitors did … nothing. “A business miracle happened,” Bezos told a conference years later. “This is the greatest piece of business luck in the history of business so far as I know. We faced no like-minded competition for seven years. I think the big established enterprise software companies did not see Amazon as a credible enterprise software company, so we had this incredible runway.”

Selipsky suspects an additional motivation: “They either didn’t believe this could be a real business, or they were so threatened by what it would do to their own business models, and the way they were overcharging customers, that they didn’t want to believe it.”

No one, not even at Amazon, foresaw how massive a business cloud computing would be, or AWS’s dominance in the space. To understand how this happened, it’s worth examining the company’s guiding principles.

Eye-roll alert: Every company has principles, missions, visions, values; the vast majority are indistinguishable and sound as if they were written by committees, which they probably were. Some of Amazon’s leadership principles, as they’re called—there are 16—sound that way, until they get a little “peculiar,” to use a favorite Amazonian word.

For example, principle No. 11 begins, “Earn trust.” Leaders, it explains, “are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume.” This peculiarity is a badge of pride at Amazon; its web page for job seekers even says that its use of the principles “is just one of the things that makes Amazon peculiar.”

Not every Amazonian observes every principle all the time; in a company of 1.5 million employees, that’s not realistic. But Amazon’s batting average is high.

To answer the basic question of why a retailer would even think of creating AWS, consider principle No. 1, seemingly the hoariest of them all: “Customer obsession.” Amazon sees itself as a tech company and sees the world as 8 billion potential customers. That’s one reason AWS made sense for a bookseller.

“I cannot tell you the number of times I got asked … ‘But what does this have to do with selling books?’” Adam Selipsky, CEO, Amazon Web Services

Amazon allows new projects lots of time, as with AWS, in part to make sure decisions are based on data. An unusual principle states that leaders “work to disconfirm their beliefs.” Groupthink is comforting, contagious, and dangerous. Being able to invoke one of the principles enables doubters to speak up. 

“We have senior engineers who will stop a meeting and say, ‘We’ve got to disconfirm our beliefs—we’re going too far here without checking,’ ” says Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, who oversees AWS’s storage services. “That’s actually kind of revolutionary in terms of corporate culture.”

It’s not a culture for everyone. Amazon is a famously demanding place to work, and there are plenty of stories of employees who found it to be too much. Media reports have criticized Amazon’s treatment of workers, and the company is battling unionization efforts at some of its e-commerce warehouses. It’s noteworthy that last year Amazon added a new leadership principle: “Strive to be Earth’s best employer.”

“It’s not good for our business and not good for our customers if we turn out great employees and burn them out, and they leave after a couple of years,” says Matt Garman, an early AWS employee who now oversees sales and marketing. “Sometimes there are people who don’t like the culture, don’t like those leadership principles. It’s not a good fit for them. People like the culture or they don’t like the culture, and I think that’s okay. But we want people here for the long term.”

Asked to describe AWS’s strategy, Tomsen Bukovec says, “That’s not a word we use a ton.” 

The foundation of conventional strategy, the subject of hundreds of books and articles, is understanding a company’s industry and competitors. That approach gets us nowhere with Amazon. What industry is it in? No one industry encompasses selling dog food and selling computing power. 

So does Amazon even have a strategy? “Yes,” says Ram Charan, an adviser to CEOs and boards, and coauthor of a book on Amazon’s management system. But “it’s not a competitive strategy,” he says. “It’s a customer strategy.” 

That’s a mind bender. Business is competition, and business strategy is inherently competitive strategy. Except that at Amazon it isn’t. If it had been—if Amazon had been conventionally competitor-focused—AWS probably wouldn’t exist. 

Colin Bryar, a former Amazon executive, says he’s often asked what Amazon is going to build next. Can it repeat what it did with AWS, create an out-of-the-blue business, unexpected and underestimated, in which it becomes dominant? “That’s not the first question Amazon asks,” Bryar says. “They ask, ‘What’s the next big customer problem we can go try to solve?’ ”

The word “big” is key. At Amazon’s size—analysts expect revenue exceeding $500 billion for 2022—small problems are simply not of interest. When company leaders identify a sufficiently big problem, they must then conclude that Amazon can solve it, and that customers will adopt the solution. Those are not easy or quick questions to answer.

Cloud computing will grow 20% annually through 2026, far faster than any other segment of infotech, according to the Gartner tech consulting firm. It’s no longer just smaller companies and startups who don’t want to invest in their own server systems. Many AWS customers are increasing their spend, and some “spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars per year on AWS,” says Gartner analyst Raj Bala, who sees the contracts. “I’m not shocked anymore to see a $200 million annual commitment, which is astonishing.”

Yet AWS’s dominance of the market will likely diminish even as its revenue grows. With a 44% share of the market, AWS has 20 points over Microsoft’s 24%—but that lead is shrinking, says Bala. “In the next five, six, seven years, that gap is going to be very, very narrow, if not equal.” That’s because “a lot of late adopter enterprises are coming to market,” he says, “and a lot of these folks will gravitate to Microsoft because they’ve got an existing contractual relationship with Microsoft.”

The narrowing gap with Microsoft is probably inevitable. AWS’s great challenge for the future is to maintain the discipline that made it a global colossus.

Losing that discipline is insidiously easy. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great , which identifies the factors shared by the world’s most successful companies, has also written an analysis of failure, How the Mighty Fall . Winners invariably maintain discipline, and loss of discipline is always an element of decline. One of the principle threats? Attempts to control workers by overregulating them. “Bureaucracy subverts discipline,” he tells Fortune. 

When a company is growing as fast as AWS, it can be tempting to weaken hiring standards. “As you grow, you start to bring in some of the wrong people,” he says, speaking of companies generally. “If they don’t get the intensity of being there, they shouldn’t be there, but if enough of them stay, you try to control them with bureaucracy. Then the right people get out, which creates a cycle.”

With success and growth come further threats to discipline. When a business is riding high, “easy cash erodes cost discipline, and that discipline is hard to recover once you lose it,” he says. Expansion brings risks, too: Responding desperately to deteriorating performance, the business bets on “undisciplined discontinuous leaps”—acquisitions or expansions for which it isn’t ready. 

At the top of its game, bigger and stronger than any competitor, AWS must now meet an enviable challenge but a challenge nonetheless: the curse of success. Its most crucial task is to maintain the unwavering rigor—the discipline—of its principles and processes.

Selipsky seems to understand the need. Asked to define his job, he is silent for several seconds. Then, quietly but emphatically, he says his job “is to ensure that the positive, productive, useful elements of what got us to this stage—that we hold those dear, and we safeguard them, and we don’t let them slip away. We don’t become incumbents.” 

Amazon’s next big, thorny problem to solve

What might be the next industry to get Amazon’s AWS-style mega-venture treatment? The leading candidate is health care. 

In 2018 Amazon bought PillPack, an online pharmacy, and last summer it paid $3.9 billion for One Medical, a membership-based primary-care provider operating across the U.S., saying in its announcement that “we think health care is high on the list of experiences that need reinvention.” 

No one would disagree. For a company that seeks big problems to solve, this may be the biggest opportunity of all. Health care is the largest sector of the U.S. economy, and the industry is growing fast worldwide. 

Data is the problem at the heart of health care’s inefficiency and unfathomable, wearisome customer experiences—and it’s possible that it could be the solution.

That data is staggering in quantity and mostly unstructured—handwritten notes and X-ray and lab reports, sometimes of life-and-death importance—in an industry that is the last bastion of fax machines. 

It’s a particularly attractive conundrum to Amazon because of the company’s dominance of cloud computing. AWS is already deeply entrenched in the industry, used by hospitals, pharma companies, equipment makers, insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and more. 

Another potential advantage is Amazon’s massive international workforce and its enormous health care needs and expenses. Just as Amazon developed AWS by observing its own software needs and seeing them mirrored elsewhere, its own challenges as a growing corporate behemoth now may point the way to a new market opportunity.

This article appears in the December 2022/January 2023 issue of Fortune with the headline, “How Amazon’s cloud took the world by storm.”

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Zoom selects AWS as its preferred cloud provider to grow its core video meeting platform

Amazon Web Services announced that Zoom has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider. The multi-year agreement extends the longstanding relationship between the two companies, enabling Zoom to rapidly scale its service on the world’s leading cloud, rise to the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, and deliver reliable services and continuous innovation for its expanding base of corporate and individual customers.

Zoom will continue to leverage AWS’s global infrastructure and unmatched portfolio of services – including capabilities in compute, storage, content distribution, and security – to create a seamless, secure extension of its data centers.

In addition, AWS and Zoom are collaborating to develop new solutions for Zoom’s enterprise users, leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS to integrate Zoom services with Amazon devices and capabilities to make it easier for organizations to run hybrid office and remote work models.

AWS has supported Zoom since 2011, and earlier this year when the COVID-19 pandemic began impacting businesses, schools, and governments around the world, Zoom expanded its relationship with AWS to keep up with surging demand as hundreds of millions of new Zoom participants began to use the platform for everything from online education to business meetings to social gatherings to exercise classes.

Over the past year, Zoom has grown on AWS to accommodate an increase from 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to more than 300 million a day regularly since April 2020.

Beginning in February 2020, engineering teams from AWS and Zoom worked around the clock and across remote locations to securely and reliably meet the needs of this vast, globally dispersed user community, adding tens of thousands of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances (virtual servers) to Zoom’s overall capacity, even adding thousands of instances in a day as usage demanded.

With AWS, Zoom is ready to meet customer demand with low latency anywhere in the world, while continuously delivering new features that improve the Zoom user experience. Today, leveraging AWS, Zoom is able to seamlessly scale with global demand for its services.

Zoom now provides video conferencing technology to more than 130,000 schools globally at no charge, as well as millions of families and individuals, in addition to the company’s traditional enterprise-scale users – businesses, governments, healthcare and educational institutions, and other large organizations.

Tied to its sudden growth, Zoom also faced sharply increased demand for customer service over the past nine months as new users adopted its platform. AWS provided Zoom with over 1,000 Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktops to help the company manage an unprecedented increase in demand for help desk support while its employees work remotely during the pandemic.

AWS also provided additional cloud infrastructure and security monitoring support to help Zoom successfully stream major events more securely, including nationally-televised sporting and entertainment events, standing up a dedicated threat intelligence team to monitor Zoom’s AWS environments during the events.

Zoom and AWS are also making it increasingly easy and secure for businesses to employ hybrid workplace models where employees move seamlessly between home and the office. For instance, Zoom will be integrating its video meeting service into select Amazon Echo Show devices (Amazon’s Alexa-enabled smart display), as well as incorporating Alexa for Business features, including voice control, into its Zoom Rooms service.

In addition, Zoom and AWS are deepening their collaboration to reimagine the future of online communication, leveraging AWS’s unmatched portfolio of services, with capabilities in machine learning, threat monitoring and response, encryption, and data visualization, to innovate new features, products, and services for Zoom users.

“Faced with unprecedented global demand this past year, we’ve been able to handle it in significant part by running the substantial majority of our cloud-based workloads on our preferred cloud provider, AWS, and relying on AWS’s performance and scalability,” said Eric S. Yuan, CEO of Zoom.

“Looking forward, we will continue to innovate alongside AWS to reinvent virtual collaboration and deliver secure and exciting experiences for our customers.”

“COVID-19 changed everything for Zoom, putting demands on the company to meet the video conferencing needs of hundreds of millions of new participants around the globe, and AWS was there from the beginning to ensure Zoom could scale to meet these new requirements virtually overnight,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS.

“When organizations build on AWS – as Zoom has done since 2011 – they transform their business, expanding and innovating much faster. Together, Zoom and AWS have delivered great experiences for new Zoom users around the world, and we look forward to using the cloud to develop new ways to help the world communicate.”

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Zoomcar – A DevOps Case Study

• By Saurabh Jain

The client is an Indian self-drive car rental company headquartered in Bangalore, India. Zoomcar holds the distinction of being India’s first personal mobility platform, with the introduction of car-sharing services in 2013. With a strong focus on the mobile experience, Zoomcar allows users to rent cars by the hour, day, week, or month. In 2018, Zoomcar introduced India’s first peer2peer based marketplace for cars with the launch of its shared subscription mobility model.

The client wants to enhance their working experience by adapting to industry-standard best practices. The team has built applications mainly on Java, Python, Go, and PHP to be deployed on AWS. However, to implement this application, the client faced many issues regarding expertise, resources, and budget issues. To solve these issues, the client reached out to the CloudThat team to facilitate an end-to-end team, streamline their processes with the DevOps best practices and achieve overall project excellence.

Risk Assessment

A carefully designed risk assessment checklist for the client by CloudThat to understand their existing IT system environments. A detailed response shed light on the security posture, networking process, connectivity models, security group management, network analysis, continuous monitoring systems, defined SLAs, and many more.

• Cloud Migration

Proposed Solution

CloudThat’s team worked closely with the client’s development team and IT team to adhere to DevOps best practices and deploy the new application on AWS infrastructure. The functions were split into different domains: infrastructure, monitoring, observability, security, networking.

• Applications must be deployed in multiple environments like development, QA, UAT, and production.
• Use an egress VPC to expose internal services to the internet and have all the applications in different VPCs with proper network segregation
• Implement highly available, scalable, fault-tolerant microservices deployed on Amazon EKS clusters across multiple environments with horizontal pod autoscaling and cluster autoscaling enabled
• Implement a branching strategy for application development to release cycle
• Implement Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and deployment to support hotfixes, rollback on failure, multi-environment deployment following the DevOps best practices
• Have Infrastructure as a Code using Terraform to perform deployment of the infrastructure for all the services
• Network-level segregation of different applications and having internal app communication via AWS backbone network
• Infrastructure monitoring in place with AWS CloudWatch, Prometheus, and Grafana with alerts enabled using Prometheus Alert manager to email and Slack channels.
• Implement application performance monitoring in New Relic to understand and trace dependencies across the distributed system to detect anomalies, reduce latency, squash errors, and optimize customer’s experience
• Setup Amazon OpenSearch Service for collecting application logs using Fluent-bit and OpenSearch dashboards analyze and visualize the application logs
• Implement PagerDuty for on-call management, incident response, event management, and operational analytics.
• Use Akamai as a content delivery network (CDN), cybersecurity, and cloud service tool to have services like web and internet security. Implementing the same for bot detection and alerting system to avoid malicious attacks on mobile and web applications provides an extra edge to the business.
• Enable logging at every point possible and plan for log storage along with the retention policy and access management.
• Have a backup strategy and a disaster recovery infrastructure in place
• Use Jira Boards for planning, tracking, releasing, and reporting the issues to have synchronous workflow within the teams

Third-Party Solutions Used

• Apache Kafka

AWS Services Used

• Highly available, scalable, fault-tolerant microservices are deployed on Amazon EKS clusters across multiple environments with Autoscaling and Application Load balancers in place.
• The tightly scoped security groups are configured as a virtual firewall for all the AWS workloads to control incoming and outgoing traffic accordingly.
• AWS Transit Gateway is used to have secure connectivity between VPCs of different apps.
• Use VPC endpoints to connect VPCs privately with supported AWS service achieving secure data transfer and reducing the cost and latency
• To ensure higher control of databases, the databases were deployed on EC2 instances for MongoDB and memsql database as clusters for failover
• To ensure high availability of Apache services like Kafka and Zookeeper, need to deploy as clusters on EC2
• Use AWS Systems manager for vulnerability scanning and patch management
• Enable AWS CloudTrail logs for all regions stored at a central S3 bucket location with log file integrity validation
• Implemented network security for EKS involves two elements: a set of rules that restricts the traffic flow between services. The other is the encryption of data traffic while in transit
• Analyze network in and out to the AWS account using ELB Access logs and VPC flow logs. Each one of the logs contains information about the packet traversing

Architecture Diagram

1. cicd flow diagram.

2. High-Level Architecture

3. VPN Connection Diagram

Results and Outcome

We have successfully built a highly secure and robust infrastructure to handle massive traffic.

• We have containerized 60% of the applications and deployed them on the EKS cluster.
• We have provided an enhanced monitoring and alerting solution, which is helping improve the performance by reducing significant costs.
• We have also performed multiple resource optimization activities to reduce the overall cost.
• We are also implementing several automation solutions for the client using Lambda functions.
• The CI/CD flow has been set up using Jenkins. As a result, new features are released faster with 99.9% uptime, which was a hurdle for the client to overcome with limited technical expertise.
• We are also documenting the implementations for future reference.

The client has a continuous delivery process with a restructured DevOps team, leading to fewer defects and a change failure rate. In addition, the client is now equipped with cross-skilled engineers who can collaborate on various projects and achieve better operational support to ensure that the fixes are much faster than before. Although team members are assigned to different tasks based on their expertise, we have knowledge-sharing sessions every week to upskill and make everyone aware of every domain.

Get your new hires billable within 1-60 days. Experience our Capability Development Framework today.

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CloudThat  is also the official AWS (Amazon Web Services) Advanced Consulting Partner and Training partner and Microsoft gold partner, helping people develop knowledge of the cloud and help their businesses aim for higher goals using best in industry cloud computing practices and expertise. We are on a mission to build a robust cloud computing ecosystem by disseminating knowledge on technological intricacies within the cloud space. Our blogs, webinars, case studies, and white papers enable all the stakeholders in the cloud computing sphere.

Drop a query if you have any questions regarding AWS services, cloud adoption, or consulting and I will get back to you quickly.

To get started, go through our   Consultancy   page and  Managed Services Package  that is   CloudThat ’s offerings.

WRITTEN BY Saurabh Jain

Saurabh Kumar Jain is a Subject Matter Expert working with CloudThat. He has experience in AWS, Microsoft Azure, and DevOps technologies. He is specialized in cloud security and architecture design. He also holds experience on various cloud and DevOps projects based on the cloud maturity model. He is an AWS Certified Security Speciality, AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate, Microsoft certified Azure Administrator and a certified Terraform Associate.

Fahd Mannaa

May 25, 2022

why EKS not ECS ?

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• Cloud Computing

AWS Case Studies: Services and Benefits in 2024

Home Blog Cloud Computing AWS Case Studies: Services and Benefits in 2024

With its extensive range of cloud services, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has completely changed the way businesses run. Organisations demonstrate how AWS has revolutionized their operations by enabling scalability, cost-efficiency, and innovation through many case studies. AWS's computing power, storage, database management, and artificial intelligence technologies have benefited businesses of all sizes, from startups to multinational corporations. These include improved security, agility, worldwide reach, and lower infrastructure costs. With Amazon AWS educate program it helps businesses in various industries to increase growth, enhance workflow, and maintain their competitiveness in today's ever-changing digital landscape. So, let's discuss the AWS cloud migration case study   and its importance in getting a better understanding of the topic in detail.

What are AWS Case Studies, and Why are They Important?

The   AWS case   studies comprehensively explain how companies or organizations have used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to solve problems, boost productivity, and accomplish objectives. These studies provide real-life scenarios of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in operation, showcasing the wide range of sectors and use cases in which AWS can be successfully implemented. They offer vital lessons and inspiration for anyone considering or already using AWS by providing insights into the tactics, solutions, and best practices businesses use the AWS Cloud Engineer program . The Amazon ec2 case study   is crucial since it provides S's capabilities, assisting prospective clients in comprehending the valuable advantages and showcasing AWS's dependability, scalability, and affordability in fostering corporate innovation and expansion.

What are the Services Provided by AWS, and What are its Use Cases?

The   case study on AWS in Cloud Computing provided and its use cases mentioned:

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Use Cases

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) enables you to quickly spin up virtual computers with no initial expenditure and no need for a significant hardware investment. Use the AWS admin console or automation scripts to provision new servers for testing and production environments promptly and shut them down when not in use.

AWS EC2 use cases consist of:

• With options for load balancing and auto-scaling, create a fault-tolerant architecture.
• Select EC2 accelerated computing instances if you require a lot of processing power and GPU capability for deep learning and machine learning.

Relational Database Service (RDS) Use Cases

Since Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a managed database service, it alleviates the stress associated with maintaining, administering, and other database-related responsibilities.

AWS RDS uses common cases, including:

• Without additional overhead or staff expenditures, a new database server can be deployed in minutes and significantly elevate dependability and uptime. It is the perfect fit for complex daily database requirements that are OLTP/transactional.
• RDS should be utilized with NoSQL databases like Amazon OpenSearch Service (for text and unstructured data) and DynamoDB (for low-latency/high-traffic use cases).

AWS Workspaces

AWS offers Amazon Workspaces, a fully managed, persistent desktop virtualization service, to help remote workers and give businesses access to virtual desktops within the cloud. With it, users can access the data, apps, and resources they require from any supported device, anywhere, at any time.

AWS workspaces use cases

• IT can set up and manage access fast. With the web filter, you can allow outgoing traffic from a Workspace to reach your chosen internal sites.
• Some companies can work without physical offices and rely solely on SaaS apps. Thus, there is no on-premises infrastructure. They use cloud-based desktops via AWS Workspaces and other services in these situations.

AWS Case Studies

Now, we'll be discussing different case studies of AWS, which are mentioned below: -

Case Study - 1: Modern Web Application Platform with AWS

American Public Media, the programming section of Minnesota Public Radio, is one of the world's biggest producers and distributors of public television. To host their podcast, streaming music, and news websites on AWS, they worked to develop a proof of concept.

After reviewing an outdated active-passive disaster recovery plan, MPR decided to upgrade to a cloud infrastructure to modernize its apps and methodology. This infrastructure would need to be adaptable to changes within the technology powering their apps, scalable to accommodate their audience growth, and resilient to support their disaster recovery strategy.

MPR and AWS determined that MPR News and the public podcast websites should be hosted on the new infrastructure to show off AWS as a feasible choice. Furthermore, AWS must host multiple administrative apps to demonstrate its private cloud capabilities. These applications would be an image manager, a schedule editor, and a configuration manager.

To do this, AWS helped MPR set up an EKS Kubernetes cluster . The apps would be able to grow automatically according to workload and traffic due to the cluster. AWS and MPR developed Elasticsearch at Elastic.co and a MySQL instance in RDS to hold application data.

Business Benefits

Considerable cost savings were made possible by the upgraded infrastructure. Fewer servers would need to be acquired for these vital applications due to the decrease in hardware requirements. Additionally, switching to AWS made switching from Akamai CDN to CloudFront simple. This action reduced MPR's yearly expenses by thousands.

Case Study - 2: Platform Modernisation to Deploy to AWS

Foodsby was able to proceed with its expansion goals after receiving a $6 million investment in 2017, but it still needed to modernize its mobile and web applications. For a faster time to launch to AWS, they improved and enhanced their web, iOS, and Android applications.

Sunsetting technology put this project on a surged timeline. Selecting the mobile application platform required serious analysis and expert advice to establish consensus across internal stakeholders.

Improving the creation of front-end and back-end web apps that separated them into microservices to enable AWS hosting, maximizing scalability. Strengthening recommended full Native for iOS and Android and quickly creating and implementing that solution.

Case Study - 3: Cloud Platform with Kubernetes

SPS Commerce hired AWS to assist them with developing a more secure cloud platform, expanding their cloud deployment choices through Kubernetes, and educating their engineers on these advanced technologies.

SPS serves over 90,000 retail, distribution, grocery, and e-commerce businesses. However, to maintain its growth, SPS needs to remove obstacles to deploying new applications on AWS and other cloud providers in the future. They wanted a partner to teach their internal development team DevOps principles and reveal them to Kubernetes best practices, even though they knew Kubernetes would help them achieve this.

To speed up new project cycle times, decrease ramp-up times, and improve the team's Kubernetes proficiency, it assisted with developing a multi-team, Kubernetes-based platform with a uniform development method. The standards for development and deployment and assisted them in establishing the deployment pipeline.

Most teams can plug, play, and get code up and running quickly due to the streamlined deployment interface. SPS Commerce benefits from Kubernetes' flexibility and can avoid vendor lock-in, which they require to switch cloud providers.

Case Study - 4: Using Unified Payment Solutions to Simplify Government Services

The customer, who had a portfolio of firms within its authority, needed to improve experience to overcome the difficulty of combining many payment methods into a single, unified solution.

Due to the customers' varied acquisitions, the payment system landscape became fragmented, making it more difficult for clients to make payments throughout a range of platforms as well as technologies. Providing a streamlined payment experience could have been improved by this lack of coherence and standardization.

It started developing a single, cloud-based payment system that complies with the customers' microservices-based reference design. CRUD services were created after the user interface for client administration was set at the beginning of the project.

With this, the customer can streamline operations and increase efficiency by providing a smooth payment experience.

The new system demonstrated a tremendous improvement over the old capability, demonstrating the ability to handle thousands of transactions per second.

Maintaining system consistency and facilitating scalability and maintenance were made more accessible by aligning with the reference architecture.

Case Study - 5: Accelerated Data Migration to AWS

They selected improvements to create   an   AWS cloud migration case study cloud platform to safely transfer their data from a managed service provider to AWS during the early phases of a worldwide pandemic.

Early in 2020, COVID-19 was discovered, and telemedicine services were used to lessen the strain on hospital infrastructure. The number of telehealth web queries increased dramatically overnight, from 5,000 to 40,000 per minute. Through improvement, Zipnosis was able to change direction and reduce the duration of its AWS migration plan from six to three months. The AWS architecture case study includes HIPAA, SOC2, and HITRUST certification requirements. They also wanted to move their historic database smoothly across several web-facing applications while adhering to service level agreements (SLAs), which limited downtime.

Using Terraform and Elastic Kubernetes Service, the AWS platform creates a modern, infrastructure-as-code, HIPAA-compliant, and HITRUST-certified environment. With the help of serverless components, tools were developed to roll out an Application Envelope, enabling the creation of a HIPAA-compliant environment that could be activated quickly.

Currently, Zipnosis has internal platform management. Now that there is more flexibility, scaling up and down is more affordable and accessible. Their services are more marketable to potential clients because of their scalable, secure, and efficient infrastructure. Their use of modern technologies, such as Kubernetes on Amazon EKS, simplifies hiring top people. Zipnosis is in an excellent position to move forward.

Case Study - 6: Transforming Healthcare Staffing

The customer's outdated application presented difficulties. It was based on the outdated DBROCKET platform and needed an intuitive user interface, testing tools, and extensibility. Modernizing the application was improving the job and giving the customer an improved, scalable, and maintainable solution.

Although the customer's old application was crucial for predicting hospital staffing needs, maintenance, and improvements were challenging due to its reliance on the obscure DBROCKET platform. Hospitals lost money on inefficient staff scheduling due to the application's lack of responsiveness and a mobile-friendly interface.

Choosing Spring Boot and Groovy for back-end development to offer better maintainability and extensibility throughout the improved migration of the application from DBROCKET to a new technology stack. Unit tests were used to increase the reliability and standard of the code.

Efficiency at Catalis increased dramatically when the advanced document redaction technology was put in place. They were able to process papers at a significantly higher rate because the automated procedure cut down the time and effort needed for manual redaction.

Catalis cut infrastructure costs by utilizing serverless architecture and cloud-based services. They saved a significant amount of money because they were no longer required to upgrade and maintain on-premises servers.

The top-notch Knowledgehut best Cloud Computing courses that meet different demands and skill levels are available at KnowledgeHut. Through comprehensive curriculum, hands-on exercises, and expert-led instruction, attendees may learn about and gain practical experience with cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and more. Professionals who complete these courses will be efficient to succeed in the quickly developing sector of cloud computing.

Finally,   a   case study of   AWS retail case studies offers a range of features and advantages. These studies show how firms in various industries use AWS for innovation and growth, from scalability to cost efficiency. AWS offers a robust infrastructure and a range of technologies to satisfy changing business needs, whether related to improving customer experiences with cloud-based solutions or streamlining processes using AI and machine learning. These case studies provide substantial proof of AWS's influence on digital transformation and the success of organizations.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

From the case study of Amazon web services, companies can learn how other businesses use AWS services to solve real-world problems, increase productivity, cut expenses, and innovate. For those looking to optimize their cloud strategy and operations, these case studies provide insightful information, optimal methodologies, and purpose. 

You can obtain case studies on AWS through the AWS website, which has a special section with a large selection of case studies from different industries. In addition, AWS releases updated case studies regularly via various marketing platforms and on its blog.

The case study of Amazon web services, which offers specific instances of how AWS services have been successfully applied in various settings, can significantly assist in the decision-making process for IT initiatives. Project planning and strategy can be informed by the insights, best practices, and possible solutions these case studies provide.

Kingson Jebaraj

Kingson Jebaraj is a highly respected technology professional, recognized as both a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and an Alibaba Most Valuable Professional. With a wealth of experience in cloud computing, Kingson has collaborated with renowned companies like Microsoft, Reliance Telco, Novartis, Pacific Controls UAE, Alibaba Cloud, and G42 UAE. He specializes in architecting innovative solutions using emerging technologies, including cloud and edge computing, digital transformation, IoT, and programming languages like C, C++, Python, and NLP. 

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