Blazeclan helped a Leading Entertainment Company Achieve a Cost Saving of ~$800

The company has Entitlement Service for DTH and OTT platform that holds online user entitlements to become a single source across verticals. The existing system faced some bottlenecks, namely,

• A limited number of calls could be made to the billing system to get an updated set of entitlements.

• The current system was not scalable to meet the increasing customer base across verticals.

• No common system for handling customer’s entitlements.

• Notification functionality takes time to post the notifications to the verticals for any entitlement changes.

The customer was looking to revamp and migrate the system to the AWS cloud to reduce the latency in entitlements, provisioning for the users to other partners and vice versa.

Approach Used by Blazeclan to Migrate Customer’s System to the AWS Cloud

The journey initially started by helping the customer understand the overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of using AWS cloud.

Blazeclan’s product development offering comprised of:

• An extensive study by our team of certified SAs began with the study of their existing code and the system.

• The new system was rewritten and developed capitalizing on open source technologies like Linux, MySQL, spring boot, angular JS, and Nginx Tomcat.

• The revamp was broken down into 2 phases:

Phase I: The application revamp was broken down into migration of-

• SOAP API to RESTful APIs

• Database engine from MSSQL to MySQL using AWS Database migration service

• Database migration from on-premise to AWS cloud

• Setting up the AWS infrastructure using automation services like Beanstalk.

Phase II: This ensured migrating the application to AWS cloud seamlessly.

• Setting up a direct connection between the company location and AWS.

• This application is a central source for entitlements information across the different system and it merges the Caching Service and Package Manager component.

• The front end was provided to the package management team which enabled them to create different packages for set-top boxes and OTT platforms.

Strategy Adhered by Our Experts to Meet the Requirements of the Customer

Blazeclan approach ensured to take advantages of:

• Cloud-Native Application that allows the developer to build loosely coupled web application architecture and utilize services like Amazon Cloud Search, SQS, SNS, S3, and RDS to build a highly scalable and fault-tolerant architecture.

• Micro Services Architecture to develop independently deployable, small and modular services to achieve a loosed coupled and scalable architecture.

• Agile methodology for the development process helped in breaking down the project into shorter sprints and in turn ensured continuous feedback at each step from the customer. The progress was tracked and reported by using the latest project management tool JIRA. Scrum practices like sprint planning sessions, stand-up calls, demo, retrospective sessions were conducted during the project delivery.

• Security Testing of the application ensured zero vulnerabilities (VAPT – Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Test).

• Operational Excellence: With a view to reviewing every aspect of the application for quantitative project management, the operational reports are shared on a weekly basis to all the stakeholders. In this process for weekly reporting, we focus on Infra related resources. This initiative has facilitated the review to be done on a broader scale and to proactively take certain necessary measures for optimizing the overall cost of the system without compromising the performance. Moreover, there were several suggestions made by the team that has helped in reducing the cost considerably.

How Our Solution Benefitted the Customer

• High Availability: The Company achieved a highly available system that could meet and cater to an increasing number of customer’s entitlements and customers for all the verticals.

• Scalability: They achieved the ability to scale the application as and when required by leveraging auto-scaling and load balancing features of AWS. The customer found it easy to scale the application in case of certain events such as elections, world cup, etc. The entitlements per second were at peak for a few hours and such peak results are seen only 2-3 times annually, lasting for a maximum of 2 to 5 hours long.

• The solution provided enables the customer to roll out features faster compared to their previous experience.

• Reduced Cost: The Company was able to decrease its operational costs considerably by migrating to AWS.

• Fault Tolerance: They were able to achieve a fault-tolerant architecture.

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