nClouds AWS Case Study
OTTera
Empowering OTT Innovation: How nClouds Modernized OTTera’s AWS Infrastructure
“We value nClouds’ expertise in helping us build and modernize our IT infrastructure – from migrating workloads to automating deployments. Plus, nClouds’ services relieve our team from the ongoing management of our AWS infrastructure so our engineers are focused on creating innovative new features.”
— Craig McEldowney —
CTO & Co-Founder, OTTera
Benefits Summary
Enhanced Scalability
Accelerated Developer Velocity
Fine-Grained Infrastructure Control
Improved Operational Efficiency
About OTTera
OTTera is a professional white-label service provider revolutionizing how companies launch Over-The-Top (OTT) media services directly to viewers via the Internet. In a market where building a comparable solution from scratch demands significant time and multi-million dollar investments, OTTera offers a compelling alternative. Leveraging a decade of professional OTT experience and supporting nearly 100 million users, OTTera’s comprehensive end-to-end solutions are adaptable to any form of content, enabling businesses to launch their own streaming platforms in mere weeks at a fraction of the traditional cost. Learn more here.
Industry
Location
Los Angeles, CA
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Challenge
OTTera faced the critical need to enhance its application scalability to accommodate a growing user base and increasing media demands. Simultaneously, the company aimed to improve operational excellence, gain more granular control over its diverse application architectures to optimize performance and security, and accelerate the pace at which new, innovative features could be delivered to its platform users.
Why AWS and nClouds?
Recognizing the power and flexibility of Amazon Web Services, OTTera sought a partner with deep AWS expertise to guide their modernization journey. nClouds’ proven track record in application modernization and cloud migration services, coupled with their understanding of the digital media and streaming landscape, made them the ideal choice. Their collaborative approach and focus on delivering tangible business outcomes aligned perfectly with OTTera’s objectives for a continuous cloud evolution.
Strategy and Solution
OTTera first engaged nClouds in 2020. Together, OTTera and nClouds have focused on the ongoing cloud journey rather than a one-and-done event. nClouds’ activities have evolved from building a production environment on AWS to managed DevOps services, including managing deployments and modernization initiatives designed to achieve greater operational efficiency and enable faster innovation.
nClouds collaborated closely with OTTera to implement a modern, containerized infrastructure on AWS. nClouds migrated OTTera’s Elastic Beanstalk workloads (API) to AWS Fargate to improve and provide accelerated container management.
The migration also involved leveraging key AWS services such as Amazon VPC for a secure network environment, scalable storage solutions with Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, and Redis, and the deployment and management of containerized applications using Amazon ECS Clusters, which automates server management, capacity planning, and isolation of container workloads for security.
Robust monitoring was implemented with Amazon CloudWatch Alarms, and content delivery was optimized through Amazon CloudFront Distributions. Amazon EC2 Gnome Boxes were utilized for specific operational tasks, including deploying and building Docker images via Jenkins agents.
To further streamline and automate their infrastructure management, nClouds and OTTera also integrated essential third-party tools:
- Jenkins was implemented as an open-source automation server to manage deployments to Amazon ECS for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, managed efficiently through Groovy scripts and the Configuration-as-Code (CasC) plugin. The CasC plugin is an opinionated way to configure Jenkins based on human-readable declarative configuration files. The Jenkins server works as a master wherein all jobs are defined and uses Amazon EC2 agents to run jobs that deploy/ build Docker images.
- HashiCorp Packer enabled the creation of consistent machine images across multiple platforms from a single configuration.
- Furthermore, HashiCorp Terraform was implemented for Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), allowing OTTera to provision, update, and version their AWS infrastructure efficiently and reliably. Notably, nClouds provided a new production environment leveraging Terraform to support OTTera’s CMS and API stack.
Results + Benefits
The strategic modernization efforts led by nClouds delivered significant results and tangible benefits for OTTera:
Enhanced Scalability for End Customers
OTTera’s end customers now benefit from a highly scalable infrastructure capable of seamlessly supporting rapid growth in media content and user engagement. This ensures customers can now support more media and more meetings with consistently high-quality streaming experiences, even during peak demand periods, directly enhancing the value proposition for OTTera’s clients.
Accelerated Developer Velocity
By adopting a modern, containerized infrastructure, OTTera’s development teams experienced a significant acceleration in their ability to build, test, and deploy applications. This faster development lifecycle translates into quicker iteration on new features, reduced time-to-market for critical updates, and increased responsiveness to evolving market demands.
Fine-Grained Infrastructure Control
The implementation of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) with Terraform provides OTTera with precise and granular control over their application infrastructure. This enhanced control optimizes resource allocation, improves capacity planning and scheduling, and strengthens the overall security posture of their environment.
Improved Operational Efficiency
Automation through CI/CD pipelines managed by Jenkins and infrastructure provisioning via Terraform significantly reduced manual effort and the potential for errors. This improved operational efficiency allows OTTera’s IT team to focus on strategic initiatives, innovation, and delivering greater value to the business rather than routine management tasks.