AWS : Leaders of Cloud Computing

Let’s begin by understanding

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources (includes RAM/CPU/HD), especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user.

There are various types of Cloud Computing:-

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a Public Cloud and a subsidiary of Amazon providing on-demand cloud computing platform.

AWS was officially launched on March 14, 2006, combining the three initial service offerings of Amazon S3 cloud storage, SQS, and EC2. The AWS platform finally provided an integrated suite of core online services and also services offered to other developers, web sites, client-side applications, and companies.

💰 AWS works on the Pay-as you-Go model .i.e., charges are based on a combination of usage hardware, operating system, software, or networking features chosen by the subscriber.

According to Amazon, the number of active AWS users exceeds 1,000,000. AWS is used by some of the most well-known brands in existence, such as Netflix, Uber, and Airbnb and many more. They also support Startups. The services they provided are from every domain from Machine Learning, Block Chain, IOT to AR/VR, Gaming, Quantum Computing, Robotics and many more.

The picture below gives you information about Big Companies that are build on AWS

The top ten AWS users based on EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) monthly spend are:

Now that you have a better understanding of the different types of AWS customers, you’re probably wondering how they actually use the platform?

AWS is used by almost all the fields, not only in IT sector but also in agriculture, media telecommunication, travelling, health care, education, marketing and advertising and many more…

✍🏻 AWS Case Study:

Everyone knows Disney!

It’s an American subscription video on-demand streaming service owned and operated by the Direct-to-Consumer & International (DTCI) subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. The service primarily distributes films and television series produced by The Walt Disney Studios and Walt Disney Televisions, with the service also advertising content from the company’s Disney, Pixel, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic brands in particular.

📝As per the articles, The Walt Disney Company Selects AWS as its Preferred Public Cloud Infrastructure Provider , Disney uses AWS Cloud.

Let’s have a look on How Disney uses AWS?

Disney uses Amazon Pinpoint — along with other AWS services including Amazon Kinesis, AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, and AWS Glue — to target customers, monitor the performance of their campaigns in real time, and gain a deeper understanding of their users’ needs and desires.

How Disney built its streaming analytics pipeline on AWS?

Video streaming is providing content creators direct data on consumer behavior like never before. However, without the proper pipeline from viewer to database, deriving insights about customer preferences and engagement can take days or weeks.

How Disney Streaming Services Uses Amazon Pinpoint to Send Personalized Messages to Millions of Users in Real Time?

Firstly let’s understand Amazon Pinpoint: Amazon Pinpoint is a flexible and scalable outbound and inbound marketing communications service. You can connect with customers over channels like email, SMS, push, or voice. Amazon Pinpoint is easy to set up, easy to use, and is flexible for all marketing communication scenarios. Segment your campaign audience for the right customer and personalize your messages with the right content. Delivery and campaign metrics in Amazon Pinpoint measure the success of your communications. Amazon Pinpoint can grow with you and scales globally to billions of messages per day across channels.

Targeting the right customer at the right time:

🔺️ Problem: When you consider the use cases for MLB’s suite of apps, you can quickly see why sending the right message to the right customer is a more complicated task than it might seem at first glance. For each of the 30 Major League Baseball teams, users can opt to receive eight different types of messages. Each of these eight message types is available in both English and Spanish. There are thousands of possible segments and combinations of segments to consider with each message sent.

✅ How AWS solves this issue: Disney Streaming Services uses Amazon Pinpoint to dynamically create unique segments and campaigns for every event in milliseconds. In the most demanding usage scenarios, Amazon Pinpoint scales to create over 300 segments and campaigns per hour, and over 20 segments and campaigns per minute.

Monitoring campaign performance in real time:

🔺️ Problem: With the fast-paced nature of Disney Streaming’s notifications and the sheer number of campaigns and segments they are targeting, monitoring their performance directly in the Amazon Pinpoint console is not scalable for their use case. However, they must have real-time notifications to let them know if their campaigns are lagging or not reaching the expected number of recipients.

✅ How AWS solves this issue: Disney Streaming developed a solution that uses AWS Step Functions, Amazon Cloud watch, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Pinpoint. This solution monitors each campaign that is created. When a campaign is executed, their solution streams data about the execution and delivery of that campaign, and sends alerts when the team needs to take a closer look at how their campaigns are performing.

🔺️ Understanding fans: After a campaign has been sent, Disney Streaming analyzes the performance of campaigns. By performing this analysis, they can better understand how customers engaged with notifications, and ensure fans are receiving a compelling experience.

✅ To achieve this, Disney Streaming uses the event streaming and exporting features of Amazon Pinpoint. They stream engagement events by using Amazon Kinesis. These events let them know how fans interacted with the application, and allow them to drill down into various performance metrics on a per-team basis. They then store these metrics in S3, which are picked up by their data lake team for further processing. By using this solution, they can create near-real-time reports for the unique audiences.

Removing unengaged customers:

🔺️ Problem: Disney Streaming also uses a custom solution to engage with customers who are still able to receive messages, and to ensure that reports only include engaged users. For example, if a customer uninstalls the MLB or NHL apps, re-installs an app but doesn’t set their messaging preferences, or starts using a device on a different platform, that customer might not be able to be contacted. Disney Streaming needs to remove these unreachable customers from campaigns so that they can maintain accurate reports on audience sizes, helping keep costs low, and reduce campaign latency.

✅ How AWS solves this issue: To delete unreachable customers in real time, the Disney Streaming team uses Amazon Pinpoint to detect when they attempt to send a push notification to an unreachable customer. Their Kinesis Firehose stream then outputs campaign data to an S3 bucket, and an AWS Glue job filters out the customers who are unreachable. Finally, a Lambda function removes the endpoint by making a call to the Amazon Pinpoint API.

So in this way, Disney uses AWS to solve their problems.

Hopefully, this article may help you know AWS and the way it’s expanding!🌏

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