About Online Streaming Entertainment Giant

A leading global media streaming and entertainment company: Handling High Critical Availability Support in Devops

Greater Agility with RailsFactory DevOps Team

Business Requirement:

The client’s IT support incumbent was under performing and they had to spend way too much time in managing issues. These deviations affected the productivity of the DevOps Consulting. Clients approached us with a requirement to provide 24/7 level 1 support to monitor, maintain and respond to the alerts from their app and its infrastructure. Client wasn’t able to ramp up the support due to non availability of a runbook and a system appreciation document.

Involvement:

As a leading DevOps solution provider, RailsFactory used a DevOps support strategy to monitor the environment round the clock with guaranteed response to critical alerts. Our team went to the client location to get a better understanding of the app functionalities, features, and prepared a document giving insights on the type of support we can deliver. We also devised a strategy for operating a runbook based task execution. Creating a lot of runbooks and appreciation documents enabled the support team to function efficiently. Our expertise in leading monitoring tools like AWS, CloudWatch, LogicMonitor, Splunk helped us in building real-time awareness of the environment status, preventing many issues from occurring and when needed, immediate step in to remediate issues. This helped the client to reduce the time to make their application live.

The Company:

The client is a leading global media and entertainment company that produces and distributes premium streaming content to worldwide audiences across subscription television platforms. It offers many premium pay TV channels, on-demand and online services, including the highly rated online streaming app. Through multichannel video distributors, including cable operators, satellite television providers, telecommunications companies, and other online and digital platforms, the client offers subscribers more than 7000 distinct premium television episodes and feature films, including Original series, first-run movies and other popular programming.

Challenges Faced:

The key task is to manage their critical cloud Infrastructure that hosts their streaming apps, to ensure its availability at a staggering five 9's that is super critical and a key success factor to their business. The success of this project would ensure their Internal IT Operations team was relieved from managing critical but unsophisticated issues to more value-add activities for better ROI.

Our Approach:

We suggested providing fully managed IT support services after completely understanding their requirements. We came up with the 24/7 shift model to suit the client with business continuity. The system was designed in such a way one can look into issue just by looking at the subject We deployed keywords as a standard practice in naming convention that helped the support team error free function. Plus, we also framed standard operating procedures to achieve efficiency, quality output and uniformity of the performance, while reducing miscommunication and failure to comply with industry regulations.

Support Services: We formed a fully operational team handling Level 1 support operations, and infrastructure management. Our support team working in the global delivery center based at India worked 24x7 to handle all operations and work alongside the in-house working during business hours. Comprising techs, the team was steeped in troubleshooting experience across different Operating Systems, applications that run on Linux/Windows.

Infrastructure Management: The dedicated infrastructure engineers were responsible for managing the virtual & physical infrastructure, and handling projects. They also worked with the development team on automation projects and were responsible for managing storage, computing and networking resources.

Solution Offered:

As a leading DevOps solution provider, RailsFactory through its Managed Services Model devised a DevOps support strategy to ensure High availability with quality and guaranteed response time.

  • Robust Knowledge Transition Methodology that focussed on critical understanding of the mobile applications, Infrastructure, Tools, historical issues, Root cause Analysis, Communication, Processes and continuous improvement opportunities.
  • Dedicated 24x7 DevOps Team that is remote and geographically distributed in India, US & Canada.
  • Created Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) and Knowledge base documents (Runbooks) for better issue monitoring and troubleshooting.
  • Pro-active issue monitoring through tools like CloudWatch, LogicMonitor, Splunk etc,
  • Automation projects to eliminate manual activities/ and improve response time in the areas of storage, computing and networking resources

Technologies: AWS Elastic BeanStalk, LogicMonitor, Slack, Bamboo, BitBucket, Splunk

Benefits to the Customer:

As a leading global media and entertainment company that wears multiple hats, the organization’s support team was keen on finding a solution. Its environment had grown complex and difficult to manage; yet, with fully managed IT support services using monitoring tools like AWS Elastic BeanStalk, LogicMonitor, Slack, Bamboo, BitBucket, and Splunk, the organization has gained a higher level of automation.

Following are few benefits client had after using our services:

  • High Availability at five 9's
  • Key Internal resources were moved to value-add jobs ensuring better ROI
  • No pain of taking turns on Week end/Holidays by Client team to ensure service availability.
  • Managed Services Model ensures that there is no additional overhead from the client to manage the Vendor team
  • Reduced Total Cost of Ownership due to remote support team.