In July of 2010, a new application for the iPad was created with the intention of easily delivering user-friendly and artfully presented content and providing a seamless integration across social media platforms, allowing the user to discover and share content from a single application-based location.

Today, we are all aware of Flipboard and the success they have enjoyed in the intervening three and a half years. SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE, broadcasting live from today’s Amazon Web Services Summit in San Francisco, welcomed Flipboard’s Head of Operations, Joey Parsons.

With a host of high-profile investors, Flipboard has enjoyed a surge in available capital to roughly just more than $60 million. Recognition from social media innovators such as the co-founders of Twitter and Facebook along with venture capitalists and even Ashton Kutcher, Flipboard has recognized and seized on the fact that we are steadily moving toward an all digital delivery of consumptive content.

Watch the entire interview here:

Parsons sat down with Jeff Frick and John Furrier to discuss how AWS has been perhaps one of the more important keys to the rapid success of his company. “When you are initially building, you pick a platform that can grow with you. When we offered our iPad app, it made sense to go with a platform that could grow with us and allow us to quickly try new things,” Parsons stated.

Flipboard has, since their inception, operated on the AWS platform. They have recognized the value of AWS through their evalutions of both cost and performance. “We’ve been on AWS since day one,” Parsons stated. “We’ve never used another platform to deliver magazine content to our users. We can’t envision a future without Amazon. The flexibility it gives us to try new experiences and scale quickly [is important to us]. Amazon makes a lot of sense for us.”

As both Flipboard and AWS continue to mature, Parsons notes the rollout of new AWS offerings and how it helps them to move forward. “We are taking a good look at Kinesis. If we do make the switch, we want to know it will go well. Ultimately, it has to lead to a better and faster experience for our readers.”

Frick pointed out the criticism often directed at AWS and other cloud provision services and that is that they are most useful for a small start-up but that they become less economical as the company grows. Parsons responded saying, “It’s a calculated bet, but there is a lot of history of companies growing and staying in the cloud.”

Parsons went on to discuss how the goal for Flipboard is to consistently provide a fast, beautiful and ‘always up’ experience to their readers. “Operationally, we aim for a 100 percent up time to ensure nobody has a bad reader experience. We strive to meet the same expectations people have for their core life tools and apps that they use. We want to be that for our readers.”

That perpetual goal and Flipboard’s continual achievement of it is that much more impressive when you consider that they manage that success with a full-time ops staff of only three.

“On the scale side we have two big systems,” Parsons points out. “A real-time interactive and also a data importing platform that is going out to our publisher content via RSS feeds and then working with the social media platforms [of our readers].” The real-time is responsible for presenting Flipboard users with the content they’ve come to expect while the other side is primarily storage of relevant content.

Parsons credits AWS with allowing Flipboard to be a far more nimble and agile operation. “[Without AWS] I think it would easily be an additional 15 people working on our hardware, managing the network, racking and stacking and provisioning.”

Be sure to direct your browser to http://live.siliconangle.tv/ to watch live event coverage and join in on the conversation at https://www.crowdchat.net/AWSSummit.

photo credit: Kazz.0 via photopin cc