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.
Jackie Cheng | 15-Oct-08 at 2:41 pm | Permalink
Will the peek get corporate POP3 support in the future?
dan | 15-Oct-08 at 2:49 pm | Permalink
You can connect your corporate POP3 server now. We have a ‘guessing’ algorithm that will try to guess the settings for your corporate email server (mail.pop3.com, etc). If that does not work you can phone our customer care center with your POP3 settings and they will setup them up.
About 10% of our users are custom corporate domains. As a note though not all corporate POP3s integrate perfectly so it may take us 48-72 hours to get it all setup and working.
Chris Kelly | 15-Oct-08 at 9:15 pm | Permalink
Will the peek allow for exchange server connection in the future?
dan | 16-Oct-08 at 6:48 am | Permalink
You can configure POP3 on your exchange server. We are looking at tighter exchange integration but I don’t think you will see anything until ‘09.
Randy Rizun | 16-Oct-08 at 8:19 am | Permalink
just out of curiosity, what is your solution for ec2 persistent storage, if any? or are your ec2 nodes essentially stateless
dan | 16-Oct-08 at 9:07 am | Permalink
We use the ec2 elastic block storage feature that was recently launched, and then we use S3 snapshots for backup.
Dakota | 16-Oct-08 at 5:13 pm | Permalink
I *thought* it was Amazon S3!
I kept seeing the “last login from ” on GMail and ran a few pings out and it hit an Amazon server.
Daniel Howard | 20-Oct-08 at 5:33 pm | Permalink
Hi Dan,
Great post, it’s good to hear that you are cutting costs and increasing availability.
I thought that I would reach out on behalf of RightScale.
If you are interested a free RightScale developer account, directions on how to sign up are on our wiki under “Getting Started”: http://wiki.rightscale.com/
If you have any questions regarding Cloud Computing or RightScale, feel free to contact me. I am happy to talk and see if there is any way we could improve your situation.
Cheers – Daniel daniel@rightscale.com
Roger | 08-Nov-08 at 1:09 pm | Permalink
Hi guys. Put mutt on there and enable text browsing via elinks/links/lynx. Open this baby up like the Chumby platform and it rule. I don’t want a phone, I want this device!
Roger
Simone Brunozzi » Blog Archive » Twitter daily Updates for 2008-11-25 | 25-Nov-08 at 5:31 pm | Permalink
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