Executive Summary
Our Client is the biggest broadcasting union in the world. Our client is also member of the World Broadcasters’ Union and works closely with the other regional broadcasting unions on matters of common concern. Customer wanted to have cost reduction in terms of time and effort for resource provisioning and infrastructure management by deploying Infrastructure as a Code.
About the Customer
Our client runs a wide range of services, including the daily Asia vision TV news exchange, several co-productions, program exchanges and technical, programming, legal and management consultancies, as well as industry and international conferences and an international frequency planning and coordination. The Union negotiates rights for major sports events and organizes their coverage for the region.
Customer Challenge
The customer needed a Media Exchange Platform for its member organizations to exchange content. The customer was using two different SaaS solution providers for separate business units or departments. They wanted a single solution that would cater to all their requirements and was not billed by the number of users accessing the platform. The customer had a usage pattern that had a broad range of volume. From next to no users to thousands of users during peak usage. They also needed flexibility of UI across multiple devices. They could foresee a need in future where different departments would need different UX designs for their respective brands. Our client wanted entire deployment of resources in the cloud platform as an Infrastructure as a code (IaaC) which is used as and when required on demand.
Why AWS
The union evaluated several cloud providers before selecting Amazon Web Services (AWS). They concluded that building their Web Application is the most cost-effective solution, and AWS provides all the services required to perform the required functionalities required to build an efficient application and deliver it. A serverless approach was decided on to build the application.
To facilitate the continuous build and deployment environment in AWS, the union chose to work with AspireNXT, an IT services provider that is part of the AWS Partner Network (APN).
Partner Solution
Using AWS CloudFormation, we provided them with Infrastructure as code which is the process of provisioning and managing cloud resources by writing a template file that is both human readable, and machine consumable.
Aspire NXT helped our customer with the deployment of CloudFormation template which contains all the required services like WAF, Lambda, S3 bucket, Cloud watch and SNS; thus, providing them the required Infrastructure as a code.
- Application is Cloud native based CloudFormation template is deployed in Singapore region, below are the services launched using template.
o WAF
o Lambda function
o S3 bucket
o CloudWatch log groups and event rule
o SNS topic
o API Gateway Endpoint
WAF service is launched from the AWS Console and services like Lambda function which will run backend application services, S3 bucket, CloudWatch service log group and event rule, SNS topic creations is deployed using CICD tools with Code build and code deploy.
- Using AWS Code Pipeline, a continuous delivery of Infrastructure has been achieved
- Using a CloudFormation stack a model serverless application is launched which provides and API gateway endpoint for the application backend operations and business logics and functions will be running in the AWS Lambda service.
- To avoid any changes in the existing services when a complete launch service fails, Enabled roll back update.
- To avoid accidental deletion of the CloudFormation template, A termination protection is in place.
- AWS CloudFormation is enabled in AWS Config service.
Results and Benefits
Building an Infrastructure as code using CloudFormation template brings many benefits. One of them is that by using infrastructure as a code we can write it once and then reuse it many times. This means that one well written template can be used as a base for multiple services, in multiple regions around the world, making it much easier to scale horizontally.
CloudFormation template can be used multiple times and each deployed version follow the same settings.
- Changes in any new template deployment or in the existing service configuration is recorded and monitored in AWS Config.
- Template versions maintained in the AWS Code Commit repository.
- Monitoring is used in the rollback triggers.
- Using Media live elemental service, our customer was able to achieve live streaming to web application from on-premise to the end users with zero latency.
- Information’s like bucket name, lambda function name, API Endpoint service is generated in the output result in the stack.
- AWS CloudFormation template is split into logical modules which is then reused for the different environments (Development, Staging and Production).
