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 on AWS:

Enterprise Transformation

Cloud migration to accelerate digital transformation and realize greater business value 

Cost Optimization

Taking control of costs and continuously optimizing spend

Data and Analytics

Keeping data secure and unlocking its value at scale

Continuous Innovation

Ongoing improvements to support transformation  

• Enterprise Transformation
• 2022

  Journey of a Snap on Snapchat

  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.