APUS, built for you. Built on Amazon Web Services

As APUS continues to grow with new features and new products added to the APUS User System, there are many important decisions we have to make. From the very start of our journey, we knew that APUS needed to be built for a global audience. This means choosing the right technology back-end that can deliver services to users in every corner of the world. In this post, we thought that we would share with you – APUS users – how we came to choose Amazon Web Services as our key partner.

As you probably already know, APUS' mission is to provide a small, fast, and easy-to-use Android user system for smartphone users around the world. This is why we created the APUS Launcher as a platform to deliver a simpler, more intuitive, faster and more stable experience to billions of Android users.

Cloud computing is fundamental to everything we do at APUS. Cloud computing lets us support APUS apps at the same time, and lets us create features built around the mobile internet. With ambitious growth goals, our team had to ensure that what we used would be globally scalable. And as a company dedicated to protecting our users' data, we needed a secure system.

When choosing a cloud platform to host its products, we looked for high reliability, dynamic capacity scaling, simplified management, and of course cost efficiency. After a thorough evaluation of the products and services offered by several domestic and overseas cloud providers, APUS eventually chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) to serve as its IT foundation for product development and operations. "After considering all our requirements, it was clear that AWS would be our best bet. AWS features a more advanced IT architecture design than the competing cloud platforms," said APUS' Founder & CEO, Tao Li.

Why Amazon Web Services?

APUS has relied on AWS to run its entire business system since the company was founded in 2014. All of our overseas businesses and associated functions—including the application interface, static resources, log collection, and data analytics—are deployed on AWS, powered by Amazon EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon EMR, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon Route 53 running in the US East and Singapore AWS Regions.

(AWS provides availability SLA’s of 99.9% for Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3, 99.95% for Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, and up to 99% for S3 Standard-IA.)The high availability enable us to quickly update our User System and services. This is why you see updates pushed to your smartphone every two weeks.

For APUS to grow its overseas user base, we want to provide a superior experience to our users worldwide. Simply translating and localizing the text in our apps is not enough. Instead we need to be able to develop in-depth understanding of the demands of local users and tailor our products and content to each person’s tastes, cultures and customs. AWS offers global service coverage through its 42 Availability Zones located in 16 Regions, including the United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea and Singapore. This global coverage, according to Tao Li, has “brought the company closer to [our] local user base.”

The Benefits of Amazon Web Services

Partnering with Amazon Web Services has provided three major benefits to APUS. An improved user experience for all APUS users thanks to its global reach, significantly reduced operation and maintenance costs, and shortened time to deploy new projects - which means faster updates and product launches.

In just two and a half years APUS apps have acquired more than a billion users. Every day, our users trigger billions of API calls to our different services in over 200 countries. Using AWS means that every time you want to enjoy the content services, personalized themes, and location-based exploration and discovery functions delivered through the user system, it works seamlessly.

One of the reasons why APUS is so stable is thanks to AWS. Any user experience is heavily affected by the stability and reliability of service. Because AWS is so robust, we can say with confidence that APUS works 99.99% of the time - ensuring you can enjoy the best user experience no matter wherever you are.

You can read more about how APUS uses Amazon Web Services on Amazon's case study page here. We hope that you've enjoyed learning more about how APUS has been created.