Snap on AWS
Snap was born in the cloud — launching its flagship app, Snapchat, in 2011 on a cloud-native, monolithic architecture. As the app grew in popularity, Snap migrated to a microservices architecture on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to improve scalability, optimize availability, minimize latency, and reduce costs. On AWS, Snap now supports more than 306 million Snapchat users sending over 5.4 billion Snaps daily with 20 percent less latency than its prior architecture. Freed from managing infrastructure, Snap engineers can focus on developing new, unique offerings, such as Bitmoji TV, which renders users’ Bitmoji avatars as the stars of personalized, animated videos in real time with the compute power of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) G4 instances. Snap continues to innovate on AWS, experimenting with new services and features to enhance visual communication and storytelling for its users.
Snap's Cloud Journey
Journey of a Snap on Snapchat
[2022] Learn how Snap rebuilt its cloud architecture for sending over 5 billion Snaps per day, leveraging AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon DynamoDB. This architecture overview walks through the challenges Snap faced in building low-latency, near real-time messaging architecture that handles over 10 million transactions per second, while optimizing the infrastructure costs by tens of millions of dollars, and reducing median latency to send image snaps by 24 percent.
Snap Optimizes Cost Savings While Storing Over 1.5 Trillion Photos and Videos on Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval
[2022] Snap migrated long-term storage for its Snapchat app to Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, saving tens of millions of dollars without diminishing performance, and it exceeded 99.99 percent availability.
Snap Reduces Median Latency of Sending Snaps by 20% with Amazon DynamoDB
[2021] Snap decided to modernize its legacy, monolithic infrastructure by migrating to a microservices architecture on AWS. Using Amazon DynamoDB, Snap optimized infrastructure costs while reducing the median latency of sending Snaps by over 20 percent and scaling up to handle more than 10 million queries per second. The new microservices architecture has improved operational reliability and provides a consistent experience for the hundreds of millions of Snapchat users around the world.
Snap Takes Advantage of Intelligent Threat Detection with Amazon GuardDuty
In this episode of AWS Coffee Break, Roger Zou, software engineer at Snap shares how Snap uses Amazon GuardDuty to continuously identify threats, monitor its network activity and account behavior for malicious activity, and receive detailed security findings that help with remediation.
AWS keeps innovating, and that lets us keep innovating.
Jerry Hunter
SVP of Engineering, SnapDiscover more on Snap's cloud journey
About Snap
Snap Inc. has reinvented how people connect and express themselves, creating apps that help people use visual communication and storytelling to build friendships and transform how they see the world around them. Today, Snap builds on AWS database and compute solutions for its flagship apps, Snapchat and Bitmoji.
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