Animoto: When scalability becomes a matter of prosperity or death
Written on 15th May 2008
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Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
Earlier we reported about Animoto, but that was before they launched their Facebook app. Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon is presenting at Next08 and started of by showing a short movie he made on Animoto followed by the Animoto fairytale.
Animoto was running on Amazon EC2 server and was using 50 servers when they had 25.000 users (note that their technology needs a lot of compute power). Probably most of you were already users then.
Now it becomes interesting. The day they launched their Facebook app, they signed up 25.000 new users per HOUR, resulting in the need of scaling to 3500 servers within 2 days. If it wasn’t for Amazon Animoto would have gone down and missed the million new users which would probably be the end of this great service.
I wonder how long it would take to call Dell, get the country manager on the line and negotiate a deal on buying 3500 new servers, meanwhile calling your local data center telling them you’re buying all their space immediately and order him to start building a new data center next to it…. I’m not sure but my guess is it takes more then two days and then I’m not talking about the costs of such a process and the opportunity costs of all those new Pro accounts.
Breaking news: Amazon invests in Animoto! Good call Jeff and Werner
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
[...] Animoto will turn your photos into a video clip that will blow your audience away. You can upload your photos or import them from a third party. Not just imports from Flickr are supported, but also Facebook, Smugmug, Photobucket and Picasa. After importing your pics you can upload any mp3 file or choose a song from their music store, which will be the background music. Big chance you already knew this service, as they’re becoming really popular. Rest assured though, as Amazon CTO Werner Vogels told that the service is perfectly scalable. [...]