Kinzin

What is Kinzin?

Kinzin provides applications and services that help friends and families create virtual private social networks for connecting, communicating, and sharing. When reviewing the specs for a new application, Kinzin chose to build first on Facebook, a social networking platform with more than 42 million active users (and growing at more than 200,000 per day). Applications released on the Facebook platform often scale from thousands to tens and hundreds of thousands of users overnight, making it an excellent environment for engaging new users. But it also creates headaches if one is not prepared to scale rapidly.

How Accelerator Helped

Kinzin needed infrastructure flexible enough to allow the application to scale with demand, while remaining affordable and easy to manage. They looked carefully at the cost in personnel and financial resources needed to manage rapidly growing Facebook applications in-house. Kinzin then contacted Joyent, known as a leader in on-demand infrastructure, and as experts in the field of scaling Web applications. The decision to deploy with Joyent was an easy one.

Kinzin started development on a Small Accelerator ($45/month) and added two Large Accelerators ($250/month) for the launch of the Are You Normal? application in Facebook in early October 2007. After the application was listed at the top of the Facebook Application directory – which brought 10,000 users to their site in one day – Kinzin added two more Large Accelerators ($500/month total) and did some fine tuning to the database and caching configuration. A couple of days later, they were listed at the top of the Recently Popular page, bringing another 50,000 new users. Listed a third time in three weeks, they built their user base to 150,000 users, and are now adding tens of thousands per day. Over 450,000 people have used the ‘Are You Normal’ – and the application continues to hum along.

Working hand in hand with Joyent, Kinzin was able to optimize their application to ensure smooth scaling, instead of the jarring crash/rebuild cycle of apps unprepared for the rapid growth that a successful Facebook application can bring. With the addition of only three or four more application servers, Kinzin will continue to grow past one million users with capacity to spare.

Additional Links

Problem

Applications built on Facebook have the potential of bringing tens of thousands of user overnight which can bring servers to a screeching halt. This means sleepless nights for your IT staff and taps deep into your pocket book.

Solution

Joyent Accelerators. Flexible, scalable, affordable, and convenient on-demand infrastructure.

Benefits

  • Focus on building your business, not a datacenter
  • Scales up and down, meeting the current demands of the application.
  • Priced so you can scale to hundreds of thousands of users without breaking the bank.
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