StackMob

StackMob offers the complete cloud-based solution for developers to build, deploy, and scale their mobile applications.

By using StackMob’s mobile platform for the backend, mobile developers can complete apps more quickly and stay focused on creating great experiences for end users.

All types of businesses – enterprises, game developers, content providers, indie developers and app dev shops – are using the San Francisco-based company’s fully hosted platform to accelerate development times and launch more feature-rich apps. In the hyper-competitive world of mobile application development, getting to market weeks ahead of schedule can make the difference between success and failure. One client, YayNinjas, was able to cut development times by 65% for its Pet Clinic game, and saved the cost of hiring a backend engineer. Pet Clinic became an App Store Top 20 game its first month out.

The Challenge

StackMob offers a comprehensive suite of services, from custom API creation to messaging, analytics, and integration with social media. The company also helps clients make the shift from sandbox to production environments and monetize their apps. Because it solves complex problems for its customers, StackMob needs best-of-class cloud services to serve as the compute infrastructure for its mobile platform, and it leverages expert advice on technical infrastructure to meet its customers’ performance standards.

Extreme Scalability. When you’re supporting successful clients, you need to be able to scale from Day One. A Top 20 iPhone app like Pet Clinic can bring three million API calls a day. To support that, StackMob searched for a cloud provider with a network and server architecture that could support massive amounts of traffic without a glitch.

Highly Performant Applications. Mobile application users expect their apps to respond rapidly. StackMob needed a cloud infrastructure that offered the fastest response times.

Costs. Building its own cloud infrastructure was cost-prohibitive for StackMob. The startup was concerned that leasing its own servers would put it into venture debt and that managing its own infrastructure would divert resources from the critical work of prototyping its own application.

The Solution

StackMob knew it needed a premium level of service for mobile app developers. Since the company was founded in January 2010, it had received seed and Series A funding from its investors. Now, it just needed to make the best use of its capital to find the right technology partner who was knowledgeable, responsive, and proactive. And it needed best-in-class cloud services that would scale from Day One. JoyentCloud offered StackMob all that, and more.

A Scalable Architecture. StackMob did a lot of evaluation and benchmarking before deciding on a cloud provider. The company needed both horizontal and vertical scale to support applications like Pet Clinic that could get 3 million API calls a day. “We use a lot of 1GB boxes on JoyentCloud so we can burst, and our API servers can scale horizontally very easily,” said StackMob CEO and Co-founder Ty Amell.

Better Performance. StackMob tried a number of cloud service providers before settling on JoyentCloud. “As an engineer, I love the technology behind JoyentCloud,” said Amell. He was impressed with JoyentCloud’s superior performance in caching, disk I/O, and memory I/O. “We looked in a terminal window and literally saw how much faster JoyentCloud’s performance was than Amazon’s EC2. Our customers need that.”

Visibility into the Cloud. StackMob was able use Joyent Analytics to make sure its mobile platform was running well on JoyentCloud’s infrastructure. “We were able to build a much more performant platform on JoyentCloud and have better diagnostics that you don’t get when you’re on the cloud at Rackspace or EC2,” said Amell. JoyentCloud also uses Zeus Technology load-balancers with MongoDB and MySQL servers.

Support & Consultation. JoyentCloud offers expert advice and proactive usage monitoring, to help clients get the most from features like automated capacity bursting. In an architectural consultation with JoyentCloud engineers, StackMob was able to plan its growth to make the most of the Joyent cloud.

For more detail, download the pdf case study below.