Ryan Angilly of MessageSling presents at the AWS Start-Up Event - Boston about using AWS for their telephony application.

1. Ryan Angilly
Founder / VP Engineering
22 September 2008
rangilly@messagesling.com
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2. Voicemail is old
 Stuck on the phone
 Deleted after two weeks
 Tough to share
 Tough to forward
 Don't have your phone? No voicemails.
 Don't have service? No voicemails.
 Battery dead? Can't get your contacts
either.
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston

3. What is MessageSling?
(for those reading these slides on the web)
 MessageSling makes it easier to integrate voice messaging into
your daily workflow, which over the past few years has come to be
mainly email and instant messaging for a large number of people.
Voicemails and contacts, for most people, are stuck on the phone.
Voicemail suffers the additional problem of not having a lifetime of
much more than 2 weeks before auto-deletion by the carrier.
MessageSling takes your voicemails and puts them into your daily
workflow by making them available at any computer, and in the
process allowing you to store them indefinitely.
 On the flip side, there are many times where contact information is
stuck on a computer -- an email, a phone number -- they never all
get onto your phone, and sometimes your phone isn't available.
With the integrated, voice-searchable contact list, your
MessageSling quot;voicemail boxquot; becomes much more, allowing you to
send audio messages to people's email from your phone.
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston

4. Shameless plug
 Started in January
 Bootstrapped for three months
 Raised some convertible debt
 Launched at DEMOfall08 in September
 Response was awesome
 Lifehacker, CIO, VentureBeat
 Thousands of users
 Looking for $$
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston

5. How we use AWS
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston

6. Benefits
 Cost
 $500/month will support 4 developers, QA and
~50,000 users
 Performance
 Latency between DB, Web, and Tel is awesome
 Scalability
 S3 and SQS response times are the same for
10 users or 1000 users
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston

7. Gotchas
 When things go down, they are sometimes
out of your control
 Outages
 Lightening strike killed EC2 for 5 hours in June
 AWS Backend node failures killed S3 for a couple hours
 Upgrade increased error rates on SQS for a few days
just last week
 Eventual Consistency
 S3 inconsistency windows
 Save/get times
 SQS inconsistency windows
 Testing issues
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston

8. Then again... Then again....
Things are rarely completely under your control....
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston
Source: http://kecute.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/lipstick.jpg

9. AWS: Not just for Production
 Dev machines brought online in seconds
 News ways to solve problems
 Problem
 Poor audio quality on small instance
 Possible Solutions
 Recompile asterisk with a different set of drivers
 Change the kernel on the EC2 instance to increase the
clock rate
 Throw more horse power at it and see what happens
 A tough problem was solved in about 15
minutes because of High CPU instances
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston

10. The Future
 SQS used to queue failed jobs
 Autoscale RoR Workers and Speech Rec
instances based on
 Requests
 Amazon SES: Static Email Service
 Despite Elastic IPs, mail from EC2 instances gets hosed
by some spam filters
 Amazon STCWAE: Something That Competes
with App Engine
 Dont make me deal with Apache and IPs and scaling
instances. Just make it work :-)
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston

11. That's all folks
Questions?
http://messagesling.com
Scot Junkin sjunkin@messagesling.com
Ryan Angilly rangilly@messagesling.com
22 September 2008 2008 AWS Start-up Tour
Boston