2. Voicemail is old
Stuck on the phone
Deleted after two weeks
Tough to share
Tough to forward
Don't have your phone? No voicemails.
Don't have service? No voicemails.
Battery dead? Can't get your contacts
either.
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston
3. What is MessageSling?
(for those reading these slides on the web)
MessageSling makes it easier to integrate voice messaging into
your daily workflow, which over the past few years has come to be
mainly email and instant messaging for a large number of people.
Voicemails and contacts, for most people, are stuck on the phone.
Voicemail suffers the additional problem of not having a lifetime of
much more than 2 weeks before auto-deletion by the carrier.
MessageSling takes your voicemails and puts them into your daily
workflow by making them available at any computer, and in the
process allowing you to store them indefinitely.
On the flip side, there are many times where contact information is
stuck on a computer -- an email, a phone number -- they never all
get onto your phone, and sometimes your phone isn't available.
With the integrated, voice-searchable contact list, your
MessageSling quot;voicemail boxquot; becomes much more, allowing you to
send audio messages to people's email from your phone.
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston
4. Shameless plug
Started in January
Bootstrapped for three months
Raised some convertible debt
Launched at DEMOfall08 in September
Response was awesome
Lifehacker, CIO, VentureBeat
Thousands of users
Looking for $$
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston
5. How we use AWS
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston
6. Benefits
Cost
$500/month will support 4 developers, QA and
~50,000 users
Performance
Latency between DB, Web, and Tel is awesome
Scalability
S3 and SQS response times are the same for
10 users or 1000 users
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston
7. Gotchas
When things go down, they are sometimes
out of your control
Outages
Lightening strike killed EC2 for 5 hours in June
AWS Backend node failures killed S3 for a couple hours
Upgrade increased error rates on SQS for a few days
just last week
Eventual Consistency
S3 inconsistency windows
Save/get times
SQS inconsistency windows
Testing issues
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston
8. Then again... Then again....
Things are rarely completely under your control....
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston
Source: http://kecute.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/lipstick.jpg
9. AWS: Not just for Production
Dev machines brought online in seconds
News ways to solve problems
Problem
Poor audio quality on small instance
Possible Solutions
Recompile asterisk with a different set of drivers
Change the kernel on the EC2 instance to increase the
clock rate
Throw more horse power at it and see what happens
A tough problem was solved in about 15
minutes because of High CPU instances
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston
10. The Future
SQS used to queue failed jobs
Autoscale RoR Workers and Speech Rec
instances based on
Requests
Amazon SES: Static Email Service
Despite Elastic IPs, mail from EC2 instances gets hosed
by some spam filters
Amazon STCWAE: Something That Competes
with App Engine
Dont make me deal with Apache and IPs and scaling
instances. Just make it work :-)
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston
11. That's all folks
Questions?
http://messagesling.com
Scot Junkin sjunkin@messagesling.com
Ryan Angilly rangilly@messagesling.com
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston