Geeky Peek

Ok, its super secret revelation time for our dedicated readers at geekypeek.com.  We’re going to try and find an easy way for you to send texts from your Peek!!!

Being a techie, I talk to a lot of people who are trying to ‘quit’ their bad cell phone habit of talking on the phone.  Generally they are now texting and emailing only.  Myself, consciously I’m not trying to give up my cell phone, but frankly I’ve become more responsive to email and text overtime.  And that has resulted in accidentally conditioning my family and friends to use email or text when trying to get a hold of me.

So based on some of those conversations, as well as looking at how some of you use your current Peeks, we have decided that we want texting.  But here’s the catch, we need some help building it.  Here’s the relative idea of how we’re going to do it (woops, guess I can’t patent it now):
1.  Have a user enter the person’s phone number in the ‘to:’ field.
2.  Look up their carrier
3.  Append the corresponding email address (e.g. phonenumber@vtext.com for verizon)
4.  Send away over SMTP

Item 2 is sort of tricky, we’ve had a hard time finding a good free way to do this.  We thought maybe some of you in the community could help us out.

Let us know if you have any zany ideas and stay tuned for more info on when we get texting working (we are close).

That’s right, I let the cat out of the bag… Peek runs on Amazon’s AWS. Our entire email service is hosted there. Currently, we now have over 30 nodes being hosted on Amazon’s EC2 service with storage of about 400GBs on a MySQL DB in their Elastic Block Storage. Honestly, the decision to use Amazon was an easy one:

1.  I didn’t have time to engineer our network and hardware
2.  I didn’t have budget to get somebody to do it
3.  I’m not the most up-to-date person for server technology
4.  Frankly, I didn’t want to do it
5.  We talked to a few other startups who used it and loved it

Generally, Amazon’s services are a godsend for startups.  We probably saved $50k – $60k (in human time and hardware), the availability so far has been top notch, and there is a great community developing solutions around it (e.g. RightScale).

Granted, our network needs are not particularly advanced… we run a mobile email service. From a connectivity perspective we have VPNs to the network provider, and we have SSL connections to the email service providers. And we don’t have stringent performance requirements. If our server is 30 seconds slower to deliver an email, nobody really notices.

And since then our decision has been proven several times over. As we’ve grown in customers we’ve been able to add new nodes with 15-20 minutes of software configuration. In fact, in the near future we will be programmatically automating our scaling so we won’t even need 15-20 minutes of manual intervention… how cool is that?

One day there may be strategic reasons to move off of Amazon, but for the foreseeable future it offers both cost savings and a level of availability we wouldn’t be able to engineer or afford.