WTIA Cloud Computing Series - Part II: Picnik Case Study. Presented by: Mike Harrington, Co-Founder, Picnik.

1. Picnik and AWSPhoto-editing Awesomeness March 3rd, 2009

2. Founded in late 2005 Based in Seattle 16 Employees No VC Built-in Photo Editor for Flickr, Smugmug Many API Partners Flash Based Client LAMPython Backend XEN Virtualization Picnik was already under development when AWS launched About Us

3. Over 1M daily visits on the weekends, 850k on week days. 9M monthly uniques 30M monthly visits Daily peak traffic 7x daily low Consistent growth, 1400% increase in YTY visits Limited Hardware Budget Limited Rack Space Small Ops Team Traffic, a good problem to have

5. Flash Security model used to require our Client SWF to proxy through our servers

6. Store images in case user accidently closes browser

7. Store images and changes for rendering saved images

8. Picnik has Perfect Memory™!

9. For Registered and Premium users, Picnik maintains a history of all edits

10. Thumbnails

11. Data Center backups

12. Started with our own storage, quickly outgrew our capacity

13. S3 to the rescue

14. Local Storage for short lived objects

15. S3 for long term storage and emergenciesS3? Picnik stores files?

16. Picnik’s architecture allowed easy expansion into EC2 Our DC was already virtualized with XEN Image rendering could easily be moved to EC2 With EC2 we could easily shift the mix of servers in our DC 0-100% of our Rendering can be sent to EC2 Daily peeks are handled transparently Auto-scaling ramps up our EC2 use when needed EC2 == Flexibility

17. Our Local storage went down for 12 hours, almost no down time as we shifted to S3 Dev time constraints limited some optimization work with our storage, S3 gave us time (months!) to solve the problem EC2 Capacity provided relief for unexpected events (our own bugs, partner hiccups) AWS – Our Picnik Blankie

18. Thanks Mike Harrington mike@picnik.com Justin Huff justin@picnik.com