Challenge: Creating a scalable e-commerce module for a VOD service

Meet TVN. If you’re from Eastern Europe, I guess you’re already familiar with the name, as TVN is a leading broadcaster in Poland. If not, you probably know another television company – WarnerBros Discovery, Inc. – and TVN is a part of the WarnerBros Discovery group.

In 2011, TVN decided to invest significant resources in creating a video-on-demand service called Player.pl. In the following years, when the whole VOD craze started in Poland, creating the Player.pl service turned out to be the right move, as it quickly became one of the leading VOD platforms in the country (just see the chart below).

In the beginning, Player.pl was working in the AVOD model (advertising-based video on demand). However, wanting to scale the business up, TVN decided to get into the SVOD market (subscription video on demand). To do that, a new e-commerce module called Sklep Player.pl had to be designed and developed – allowing people to access movies and TV series for a monthly subscription fee.

Of course, to scale your business up, you need scalable software first. TVN had to be sure that their new SVOD solution would be prepared for constant changes in the number of viewers.

In the evening, when people tend to grab a bowl of popcorn and watch their favorite TV series, your VOD software’s infrastructure needs to be ready for big numbers. However, in the middle of the day, paying for this server capacity becomes redundant.

TVN had to make sure that the infrastructure behind their platform was ready for such scalability, as well as for any possible future challenges (think disaster recovery and constant infosec improvements). Thus, they decided to migrate to the cloud.

Solution: Cloud migration consulting aligned with business needs

TVN needed a technological partner who could analyze their needs, advise in choosing the best cloud migration solutions and, finally, execute the cloud migration itself. Pretius was already one of TVN’s partners, as we had been working together on other software solutions for a few years. Therefore, it seemed natural for TVN to approach us with this new cloud migration project as well.

To be completely honest, we didn’t have any huge cloud migration case studies under our belt back then. But – with a few cloud enthusiasts on board, a dozen of enterprise-grade projects in the portfolio, and enough courage to undertake this new task – we were able to prove our worth as cloud migration specialists.

We started with carefully analyzing the TVN’s existing software. Together we decided to conduct a lift-and-shift migration to Amazon Web Services. The lift-and-shift strategy means rehosting your applications, data and traffic to the cloud – it’s a great choice when the fastest time-to-market is crucial in your business case. Then, you can proceed with cloud optimizations but, according to AWS, even when sticking to the rehosting only, you can save roughly 30 percent of costs.

We migrated TVN’s applications (Java), databases (MySQL), servers (Varnish, NGINX), and monitoring services (RabbitMQ, ELK) to Amazon EC2 virtual machines. What’s more, all instances were created using so-called autoscaling groups, and managed load balancers were introduced.

It means that the new cloud infrastructure uses only the resources which are needed at the moment, limiting the costs. Previously, with the on-premises infrastructure, TVN had to maintain all the bare-metal servers all the time.

The migration to AWS also meant automation of many processes such as system security patching. Thanks to that, the number of administrators’ tasks was significantly reduced – resulting in additional money savings for TVN.

Effect: Scalable cloud infrastructure and even more future possibilities

By analyzing the business needs of TVN, we were able to create the most efficient cloud migration scenario for them. And the most important effect of this whole migration can be summed up using one word only: scalability.

In September 2020, the TVN’s VOD platform served over 60 million views. And that’s awesome but, thanks to the autoscaling features, the system is prepared for even heavier traffic.

The technological partnership between TVN and Pretius continues, as we’re maintaining the new solution and planning further development. To maximize the benefits of the cloud migration and to reduce architecture complexity, most of the virtual machines can be transitioned to AWS-managed services. In fact, the TVN’s new system already went through the second stage of migration, i.e., moving MySQL databases to Amazon Aurora – the MySQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud. And next stages are about to come.

In the meantime, Pretius became an AWS Partner. It means that, after meeting several criteria, we entered a group of cloud vendors endorsed by Amazon Web Services. As for now, we have over 5 AWS certifications – both among software architects and sales consultants.

If there’s one thing that both TVN and Pretius learned during this collaboration, it’s that: if you know your business needs and you can find a good technological partner who can help you achieve that – cloud migration is a great way of making your business more scalable.

Are you thinking about moving your software to the cloud? At Pretius, we have a team of certified cloud specialists who can provide you with the cloud migration consulting you need. Just drop us a line at hello@pretius.com or using the contact form below – we’ll respond in the next 48 hours.