Stateless Systems developed Trendsmap.com entirely upon Amazon Web Service (AWS), with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) as its primary service. Amazon EC2 functions as Trendsmap.com’s processing and web serving platforms. The Stateless Systems developers built the core of the website’s foundation in Ruby and additional components with MySQL, Memcached, Nginx, and Sphinx.

To handle the large amount of data processed by Trendsmap.com, the developers created a custom parallel data processing pipeline to control workloads among its Amazon EC2 instances. The application incorporates four database servers and more than 20 Amazon EC2 instances in total for processing.

Trendsmap.com relies on several different features within Amazon EC2, including Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). The Stateless Systems developers use this flexible block level storage to house the site’s growing dataset, which increases in size by many gigabytes every day. When Stateless Systems needs access to short-term processing of large volumes of data for Trendsmap.com, it calls up Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. Amazon EC2 Spot Instances allow Stateless Systems to save money by bidding on unused instances to temporarily augment the site’s computing resources.

Stateless Systems also uses Amazon EC2 Elastic IP addresses. John Barratt explains the convenience of this Amazon EC2 feature: “The Elastic IPs have allowed us to transfer public services from one host to another very easily and without any downtime. And, they also allow for no-fuss movement of servers that have been whitelisted by external services such as Twitter, without having to get them to update their configuration.”

In addition, Trendsmap.com uses the Elastic Load Balancing feature to distribute traffic between its multiple Amazon EC2 instances. Stateless Systems developers recently credited Elastic Load Balancing with helping them to avert a potential service outage involving Trendsmap.com.