The founders went looking for a cloud provider that would enable them to quickly and cost-effectively develop an application that would delight customers. “While we were researching our options, we noticed that Amazon Web Services (AWS) kept adding all these features that we could really use,” Langel says. “In terms of saving costs and enabling flexibility, there really was no competition.”

The company decided to build its application on AWS. “In our opinion, no one else was offering fully hosted solutions with the kind of flexibility on the server application side that AWS offers,” Langel says. “We can run whatever we want to on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and have confidence that we will be able to provide reliable service to our customers.”

Now the company runs its application entirely on AWS, storing and analyzing billions of events on Amazon DynamoDB and using Amazon Kinesis for real-time processing of events. Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached is used for in-memory caching, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is used to store images.

Dash saves its customers money by providing information about their car’s performance and safety and letting them know where they can save money on gas or services, given their current location. This can only happen with real-time data. This requires Dash to collect the current diagnostics and location data from the vehicles and immediately match it to GIS, marketing and contextual data, then refresh it 4 times per minute.

This kind of driver awareness and enrichment demands real-time streaming data, so Dash uses Amazon Kinesis to collect vehicle and location data every 1-4 seconds from each car, ingesting a total of over 1 TB of data per day from thousands of individual vehicles. Dash monitors around 30 unique data points in the vehicles to trigger offers and alerts, chart trends, and measure performance. The data that is continuously put into Amazon Kinesis is processed and organized as shards that are partitioned by key variables (partition keys), which are then streamed to multiple AWS services for analysis, visualization, enrichment and storage.

Dash runs its application server code on Amazon EC2, as well as hosting its marketing site and its staging environment. Elastic Load Balancing helps balance the traffic to its website, Amazon Route 53 handles the company’s Domain Name Service and Amazon CloudWatch is used to monitor the health of Dash’s system.