Suamusica: Empowering Indie Artists with Next.js and Ampt

Industry: Music Streaming

Use Case: Hosting Next.js applications on AWS

Highlights:

• Suamusica overcame the complex challenges of building and maintaining infrastructure for their Next.js applications on AWS by leveraging Ampt's fully-integrated approach.
• Opting for Ampt brought greater control and customization, including integration into their existing infrastructure that unlocked significant cost benefits by utilizing their volume discounts on various AWS services.
• Ampt's automated infrastructure management and "Smart Compute" automatically optimized workloads, allowing the team to focus on enhancing customer offerings and improving their productivity.
• Future plans involve migrating additional workloads and applications to deepen their relationship with Ampt.

Suamusica, which translates to "Your Music," is a music streaming platform that enables indie artists to create, share, and distribute their work. Acting as a bridge between artists and music lovers, this platform offers a space to share a wide range of creative expressions. As one of the most downloaded apps in Brazil with more than 60 million requests per day, when it came to scaling their Next.js website on AWS, they encountered challenges they were able to overcome with Ampt.

Modernizing for Better Performance

Initially, the Suamusica app was built using PHP and was running on a fleet of AWS Lambda. The team decided to rebuild with the Next.js full stack framework to achieve better performance utilizing more modern cloud technologies. Before finding Ampt, the company struggled to run Next.js applications on AWS that involved significant effort and expertise in infrastructure setup, scalability, and deployment.

The goal of modernizing was to reduce the time and effort spent on these tasks, enabling them to focus on providing value to artists and freeing up time for other projects. The team began exploring alternatives that could streamline the development and deployment processes of their new Next.js applications.

Discovering Ampt

After learning about Ampt through a blog post, they conducted a series of tests and verified that Ampt could provide exactly what they were looking for. Ampt streamlined the infrastructure setup and management process, improved scalability, and enabled automatic continuous deployment, among several other benefits.

Although there were other options like Vercel or Netlify, the team chose Ampt because it allowed them to deploy their Next.js application to their existing AWS infrastructure. This gave them more control and customization, secure integration into existing datastores, and unlocked significant cost benefits by utilizing their volume discounts on AWS services such as Cloudfront.

Cost-Effective Scaling with Ampt

With the benefits in mind, the Suamusica team decided to utilize Ampt to support their production website traffic. This meant handling over 60 million invocations per day. Ampt defaults to AWS Lambda for most compute tasks, but given Suamusica’s scale, this was not the most cost-effective or performant choice. The Ampt team enabled its "Smart Compute" feature, an approach that switches traffic to AWS AppRunner for sustained, high velocity workloads. This allowed Suamusica to achieve a more cost-effective solution without any code or configuration changes.

The team now confidently works on their new application using developer sandboxes and previews that utilize Ampt managed AWS accounts, while deploying to their production accounts through automated CI/CD integration. Alan Trope, Suamusica CTO, sees Ampt as a perfect fit for developers who wish to focus on writing code without worrying about managing cloud infrastructure.

Future Plans with Ampt

With continuous feedback from Suamusica, Ampt is working to build and release new features that aim to improve the Next.js experience for all customers. Alan Trope noted that support has been the best feature of the Ampt platform. He believes that the assistance from Ampt engineers who understand the platform and promptly address issues is invaluable, building confidence and ensuring a smooth development process. Suamusica has already started to migrate other applications like internal portals to Ampt. With their sights set on migrating all possible workloads and applications, the company plans to deepen its relationship with Ampt. This collaboration is set to bolster the company’s operations while propelling their vision of providing a comprehensive platform for independent artists of Brazil.