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Publication:
July 2011
Categoria:
Marketing
Client:
Ninja Marketing
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The client and the context

Ninja Marketing is the benchmark for innovation in marketing and communication. Founded in 2004 by Alex Giordano and Mirko Pallera, it has been since before YouTube existed a valuable resource for understanding the changes taking place in marketing and communication, in the technological and social innovation behind the very rapid evolution we are witnessing. Since its foundation in a hidden “lair” on the Amalfi Coast, Ninja Marketing has aggregated a movement of creatives, marketing professionals, and Communication Science students, united by the desire to renew the way companies communicate.

Ranked number one among Italian marketing blogs, Ninja Marketing is visited daily by influencers, trendsetters, early adopters, entrepreneurs, agency and company managers, pr people, journalists, geeks and Web 2.0 enthusiasts.

ninja nuvole

Migration

Ninja Marketing’s AWS cloud migration was structured in three key steps:

  • DNS server migration
  • content migration
  • computing infrastructure migration

The first step involved managing the DNS servers, which were initially hosted on the same physical machine as the other services. To reduce risks and simplify subsequent tasks, VMEngine transferred control of the DNS to AWS Route 53, eliminating an initial point of failure and reducing the load on the physical server by approximately 50,000 queries per day.

The second step involved migrating static content—such as photos, documents, and other assets—via a transparent copy to the CDN consisting of Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront. This made it easy to change the public link to the content—from www.ninjamarketing to cdn.ninjamarketing —and significantly reduced the load on the physical server, which had become overloaded due to network and disk I/O requests.

Thanks to this configuration, approximately 135,000 requests per day were routed to Amazon’s globally distributed data centers. The use of the AWS Content Delivery Network also improved the speed of access to the portal’s content, bringing photos and documents closer to users via edge servers geographically closest to the HTTP request.

Once DNS management via Route 53 and content delivery through S3 and CloudFront were completed, VMEngine deployed its computing infrastructure on AWS. The solution involved the use of Elastic Load Balancing, custom Linux web server AMIs, and Amazon RDS MySQL, a Linux Memcached system, and a Linux NAS with an EBS volume.

This architecture has made it possible to share code files and content that has not yet been distributed—or cannot be distributed—via a CDN among the various instances Amazon EC2instances, managed through scaling policies and alerts configured on Amazon CloudWatch.

As a result, the migration enabled Ninja Marketing to transition from a physical infrastructure centered on a single server to a more scalable, reliable, and high-performance cloud environment, capable of better handling the portal’s traffic and reducing the bottlenecks in the original architecture.

Benefits

Moving to Cloud Computing brings many benefits, including:

  • Scalability
    With AWS data centers distributed across five macro-regions (USA East, USA West, Europe, Asia South, Asia North), you can access virtually unlimited computing power, adaptable to your needs and budget.

  • Reliability and Disaster Recovery
    The AWS infrastructure ensures high reliability and redundancy. Furthermore, the flexibility of the services enables disaster recovery strategies capable of restoring the Ninja portal in just a few minutes, even in the event of a complete data center failure.

  • Automation
    Automatic scaling policies allow you to increase or decrease resources based on actual traffic, avoiding wasted power or overloads. This approach optimizes costs, especially during off-peak hours (e.g., at night).

  • Unlimited Connectivity
    AWS offers extremely high bandwidth with no predefined limits. Billing is based on usage, transparent, and free of hidden restrictions—unlike many traditional providers.

  • Apertura globale
    La distribuzione geografica dei datacenter e degli edge server della CDN elimina ogni barriera territoriale, consentendo di gestire progetti internazionali in lingue diverse direttamente dall’Italia.

  • Cost Optimization
    Our goal is to maintain or reduce the customer’s TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). We design and implement the solution based on historical budget data, optimizing the cost-to-performance ratio. The pay-as-you-go model allows us to accommodate a larger number of users without rigid fixed costs.

"The Ninja for hundreds of years lived in the mountains, practicing esoteric arts and devoting themselves to the study of the fundamental laws of nature. They were thus able to perfect a system of martial arts that earned them a reputation as invincible warriors. With these words began in 2004 Ninja Marketing, at that time the first observatory blog on unconventional marketing. It was Ninja Marketing,that coined the definition Non-Conventional Marketing making it one of the most widely used by innovators in the field of marketing and communication."
Vincenzo Masiello
CEO - ECM
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