Amazon Web Services > Case Studies > Vodafone Hosted On AWS

Vodafone Hosted On AWS

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

The Customer

Vodafone

About The Customer

Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) operates the Vodafone and 3 brand mobile telecommunications products. VHA was formed in June 2009 following a merger between Vodafone Australia and Hutchison 3G Australia. VHA provides mobile services to more than 6 mill

The Challenge

Vodafone found that traffic for the applications peak during the four-month period when the international cricket season is at its height in Australia. During the 2011/2012 cricket season, 700,000 consumers downloaded the Cricket Live Australia application. Vodafone needed to be able to meet customer demand, but didn’t want to invest in additional resources that would be underutilized during cricket’s off-season.

The Solution

Vodafone uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances in Auto Scaling groups to create a web services tier for its mobile applications. Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes traffic from the mobile applications across the instances. The company uses Amazon CloudWatch with Auto Scaling groups to monitor CPU usage and to scale from three Amazon EC2 instances to nine during peak periods automatically. Auto Scaling ensures that Vodafone only consumes the resources that it needs to meet demand. The web services tier integrates with a third-party content delivery system for voting and lives score information.

Data Collected

Connectivity Status, Energy Cost Per Unit, Network Coverage, Number Of Connected Devices

Operational Impact

[Efficiency Improvement - Operation]
Before AWS, Vodafone could support a maximum of 3,000 simultaneous live streams. With AWS in place, Vodafone has been able to provide up to 10,000 simultaneous live streams and accommodate live scores requests at the rate of 1,000 requests per second (rps) during peak periods. In one month alone, Vodafone streamed more than 24 TB of data just for the iPhone. Vodafone uses an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL DB Instance to store cricket score information from content providers. Vodafone runs the DB Instance as a Multi-AZ deployment to automatically provision and manage one standby replica in a different Availability Zones, which minimizes the risk of downtime.