CASE STUDY
West Coast Media
AWS Migration
Producing & Streaming High Quality Movies
Based out of Los Angeles, West Coast Media is a brand that produces and streams high quality movies. The brand is changing the entire landscape of online movie streaming; focusing more on upscale streams rather than the run-of-the-mill 480p or lesser quality videos.
Industry
Entertainment, Media
Challenge
Migrating onto AWS to support high traffic, website speed and lower costs
Services & Tech
Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Migration, AWS CloudFront, AWS CloudWatch, Amazon VPC, Amazon Elastic Transcoder
High Traffic Environment
West Coast Media operates in a high traffic environment; members have come to expect and demand new published content daily. Unlike other online movie streaming sites, all of the content on West Coast Media is delivered in high definition (HD) pictures and 1080p videos. Hosting an environment that holds over 64,000 pictures and 700 HD videos is no easy task. In order for West Coast Media to succeed, customers needed to have the ability to quickly and smoothly download and stream unlimited HD content.
Before the help of Onica and Amazon Web Services (AWS), West Coast Media was struggling in two different environments:
Business – Highly expensive environment to run
Performance – Customers were complaining about site speed and download speeds.
Renting physical hardware, West Coast Media utilized two data centers to provision web application and database environments. One data center was located in San Jose, California while the other was across the globe in Amsterdam.
West Coast Media expressed the desire to have greater visibility over the customer experience and the ability to maintain high levels of up-time to support the expansive client base. On top of this, West Coast Media wanted to further utilize the AWS content distribution network, CloudFront, Amazon’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) to enhance the customer experience.
OUTCOMES
How We Helped
Acknowledging their hiccups and problems, West Coast Media knew that something needed to be done. By leveraging Onica and turning to AWS, West Coast Media found that the products and applications within AWS would help them in multiple problem areas. Within AWS, the multiple geographic locations help reduce the risk of outages while allowing West Coast Media to position their infrastructure locally to end-customers in order to improve performance.
To stay relevant and on demand, West Coast Media prides themselves on providing new content to their members daily. AWS allows West Coast Media to scale rapidly in the cloud that is highly available with the durability of 99.999999999%.
Onica´s recommendation of adopting CloudFront will provide a vastly improved end customer experience; this will smoothly distribute West Coast Media content.
Along with CloudFront, the entire West Coast Media environment is built within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which offers network flexibility, enhanced security options and improved networking performance via enhanced networking on EC2 instances.
By adopting Amazon Elastic Transcoder, West Coast Media discovered it was more efficient and cost effective for developers and businesses to convert (or “transcode”) media files from their source format into versions that will playback on devices like smartphones, tablets, and PCs. Onica’s introduction of this tool allowed West Coast Media to dissolve additional servers, save money, and improve performance all at the same time.
Due to its deep visibility into the infrastructure and services offered, Onica leveraged the power of CloudWatch. CloudWatch became a valuable tool for West Coast Media to auto scale the environment dynamically as customer load demands.
“We view Onica as our software technology partner. Onica is helping to develop our software technology and mobile products that are used by people all over the world. Six months into the partnership and we’re increasingly satisfied!”
Jacob Zuppke
Executive Vice President
WHY US
Why Onica
Onica is one of the largest and fastest-growing Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partners in the world, helping companies enable, operate, and innovate in the cloud. From migration strategy to operational excellence and immersive transformation, Onica is a full spectrum AWS integrator. Learn more at www.onica.com.
