Being able to move faster with fewer resources is a significant advantage for Peak. “We just click on a button and instantly get huge amounts of capacity. Without AWS, we wouldn’t be able to do this with the resources available to us,” says Lamarque. “The ability to grow from two to four services or increase read/write capacity of a database without spending more than five minutes on it from an IT management perspective is amazing.”

With more than one million games played a day, and each game being about 8 KB of compressed data, the infrastructure has to handle more than 8 GB of compressed data daily. It also needs to have the capacity to scale to handle much larger spikes in demand. This is something Lamarque is confident about in using AWS: “If we had two or three million more users tomorrow than we had today, it wouldn’t worry me. And, significantly, I don’t have to waste time planning for this eventuality—the system just scales to accommodate whatever amount of users we have.”

This confidence was put to the test recently, as Lesuisse recalls: “About the same time as Peak was featured in the Apple app store, we had a high-profile PR event. To say that this generated a lot of interest is an understatement. In one day, the load on our server more than doubled. We didn’t predict that this would happen or have any special measures in place, and the amazing thing is the system just coped. It was just a normal day for us—we didn’t even blink. This wouldn’t have been possible without AWS.”

While ease of management and scalability are core advantages of the startup’s AWS-based infrastructure, it’s the agility that the cloud technology enables that really stands out as a key to the company’s success. “We’ve managed to get this far and keep our operations lean and focused because we know it’s exactly this sort of structure that fosters innovation. AWS understands this too. It helps us create great services rather than worrying about how our infrastructure will cope if those services succeed in the market and demand goes through the roof,” says Lesuisse.

Lamarque continues on the theme of innovation, “To be able to fail cheaply is key to our operations. The AWS-based infrastructure encourages us to experiment because we know if something doesn’t work, we haven’t wasted masses of time and money on an idea. On the other hand, we can get up and running with a successful idea really quickly. It’s a win-win situation with AWS.”

With an eye to the future,

and some exciting opportunities enabled by its agile IT, Lesuisse concludes, “Using AWS, we have a platform that will grow with us. Key to our plans is leveraging our valuable data for research projects that could have wide-reaching applications in education, health, and many other fields.”