Cloud migration for a video streaming platform led to exponential growth in viewership

Client Introduction

Our client enjoys the reputation of being a top video content provider in the United States of America. The popular online streaming platforms allow users to view television series, movies from all genres, short films, documentaries and much more.

The client contacted us for cloud migration because it needed the flexibility and the agility to meet up with its growing demands.
Software modernization of legacy applications and databases was the main driving concern for the client to opt for cloud migration.

With increasing demand, the business found it very difficult to meet the cost demands of its data centers. The client also required mobility that would allow its team to work from any location and was looking at ways to improve team collaboration and performance. It faced large-scale database corruption making it mandatory for the concern to move away from vertically scaled single points of failure towards a more scalable, believable distributed cloud system.

The Requirement
  • Establishment of a cloud management platform that will allow for the integrated management of public, private and hybrid cloud ecosystems.
  • The shifting of all the software applications, databases and IT resources to remote servers in a coherent, seamless and secure manner.
  • Strengthening of the content delivery network(CDN) that intends to deliver seamless content to users based on geographical proximity to servers.
  • Allowing for the delivery of speedy content delivery for websites with high traffic volume for a large geographical reach.
  • Continuous provisioning and de-provisioning of collected and pooled resources to match current demand and achieve the necessary elasticity.
  • Achieving efficiency for the development of the new software code for both web and mobile applications to register savings in hardware costs.
Challenges
  • Based on its traditional model, cloud migration was a challenge considering the company culture and ideologies.
  • It wanted to use the migrated cloud service provider for all its computing and storage needs that included databases, data analytics, recommendation engines, video transcoding and much more.
  • The need for elasticity was a challenge as new runtime had to be added and framework support to be provided for community buildpacks.
  • To achieve sufficient load balancing which would act as a reverse proxy to distribute application traffic to multiple servers to prevent application servers from becoming a point of failure.
  • Being a traditional content delivery company, the need for the company to overhaul its entire IT strategy was a big challenge as people had to become a part of the change they did not accept easily. As a cloud services provider, we were responsible to make things smooth so that cloud adoption was easier leaving no gaps.
  • The business strategy of the client was inherently complex. It was a mishmash of different objectives going into different directions.
Chapter 247 Process

Since the client wanted us to build the migration strategy from scratch the project took close to a year to build. In order to take advantage of cloud computing benefits, we adopted a hybrid cloud migration approach that was needed for the project to achieve maximum results. We combined the best parts of the Lift and shift, application refactoring and re-platforming strategy as every step had a different process and purpose.

It was important in the process to identify connections between services and to ensure which service depends on which service. Since the client operations involved a lot of complexities we used monitoring applications that used service maps to create dependency diagrams. Based on these dependency diagrams we handpicked the components that had to be migrated. We started off with the services requiring minimum dependencies.

In order to update the client and keep the momentum of interaction going, we used the scrum methodology. There were numerous advantages registered when this method was followed

  • Our communication was more transparent and increased team accountability
  • Based on our regular interactions with the client and updates being inculcated in the process, scrum enabled us to accommodate changes in an easier manner.
  • It also resulted in huge cost savings as the multi-phased approach ruled out glitches
Solution Delivered
  • We took on the role of a migration architect and started planning the entire process that included designing strategies for data migration, defining cloud-solution requirements and also ascertaining the migration priorities and switchover mechanisms.
  • Our team undertook deep cloud integration to modify the client application during the process so that the benefits of key cloud capabilities can be optimized in the solution.
  • We took a gap-analysis study and assessed the needs to reach the goals we had set initially. This process provided clarity regarding current utilizations and configuration and also the costs. Gap analysis proved to provide a perspective on the gap between where the solution was and where it wanted to be.
  • Right from the beginning, we treated the transition as transformational which required overhauling the internal processes. All the stakeholders were aligned to this new paradigm making it easier for the team to accept the migration.
  • Our team of agile developers, coders and strategists made use of numerous tools like New Relic, APPDYNAMICS, AWS Cloudwatch logs enabled us to gain application level-insights as well as monitoring on AWS.
  • We leveraged the power of Amazon Web services (AWS) which helped us to reduce the time we spent on auto-scaling.

Resources and time

Duration

11 months

Resources

5

Key benefits

Provided to the client

  • Our strategy ensured that the client had the capability for self-help compared to their legacy data centers.
  • The client got an upper hand that enabled them to deploy, test, iterate and scale their application. Our solutions endowed them with operational and development flexibility which was initially difficult as it was a legacy infrastructure.
  • A cornerstone characteristic of the cloud that the client got was multi-tenancy with benefits like data center consolidation, seamless experience, regardless of the fact that they are running on shared resources, operational efficiency and consolidation, resource sharing across compute, storage and networking.
  • This workflow provides operational and development flexibility, not easily achieved in legacy infrastructures.
Business Impact

Our bespoke cloud migration strategies designed keeping in mind their current IT infrastructure and future needs resulted in huge success.

  • The platform achieved a 35% increment in the memberships of its streaming platforms
  • With the increased elasticity in their application, the client was able to reap the additional benefit of more than 28% in cost savings.
  • It achieved exponential growth in their overall viewerships
  • Elimination of outages due to the inefficiencies of the data centers

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Clients Speak

Chapter247’s output has helped improve site performance and boosted lead conversion. Despite the time difference, their seamless communication and organized workflow led to positive results.

Mathieu Valois-Chénier
Co-Founder & Administrator, AnalystPrep