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base2Services and Sardius Media speed up live video streaming on AWS

"You guys are amazing! The best decision we ever made for our DevOps was getting base2Services. We at Sardius appreciate the time and cost that you have saved us."

Ari Burt, Co-Founder and Vice President of Global Sales

A bit about Sardius Media

Sardius Media is a development and consulting firm that comes alongside organizations to implement customized online video solutions. Sardius Media’s expertise mainly resides in three categories: Live Automation, Consulting/Professional Services and Live Events Streaming. Sardius Media is committed to offering customized services through its cutting-edge technology in order to serve its clients’ needs efficiently.

What Sardius Media needed

One of Sardius Media's main services is to provide custom web development for their clients’ websites. As their organization grew, they saw an increased need to better allocate their internal resources in this area. Rather than looking after the infrastructure for their clients, they wanted to focus on delivering their core products and deploy using DevOps practices.

They needed the capability to rapidly deploy and scale websites for the hosting of video content, and to maintain and support them on an ongoing basis. For example, one of the challenges was that their major client’s website and store, which receives up to 2.6 million views per month, experienced slow page loads and frequent outages during major events, costing the client revenue. In order to resolve this, they wanted to migrate their customers’ websites to AWS and implement a best practice DevOps approach that was repeatable across their existing and new clients. Sardius was looking for a partner that they could work closely with to help them apply DevOps principles and maintain a system that operates 24/7.

How base2Services delivered

Sardius Media engaged base2Services to introduce DevOps practices, but the initial architecture required remediation to make sure their technology comes inline with the DevOps toolsets. As part of our DevOps as a Service offering base2 worked as the extension to Sardius' development team not only by helping them with the initial migration of their two biggest customers from Rackspace to AWS but more importantly, by optimising their cloud infrastructure, continuous integration, continuous deployment and 24/7 support to maintain the solution on an ongoing basis.

The DevOps as a Service process started with the initial migration and implementation of DevOps processes of only one client. base2 delivered an autoscalable environment, infrastructure deployment automation and implemented CI/CD processes for the application and the infrastructure code using open source tools. Once that was achieved base2 provided 24/7 support for that solution.

As part of ongoing enhancements we then focused on migrating the second client who’s website needed to support streaming of huge data volumes in the order of petabytes while needing to minimise costs. Base2 replicated the solution with some adjustments for specific requirements but also introduced containerisation of the build and application deployment using ECS, to improve deployment time and increase infrastructure utilization. Our DevOps as a Service approach means this was not a separate project but is merely part of providing ongoing expertise.

base2's solution enables Sardius to replicate the solution and processes across any given number of clients and therefore enables them to expand their client base. Sardius also benefited from ongoing architectural advice and guidance to build out their own video automation solution allowing them to focus on their core business.

See the impressive results

  • Through the implementation of DevOps processes, Sardius is able to focus on its core business, their video automation product, and attracting new clients, while streaming an average of 2 petabytes of video content a month.
  • Page load times for their customers have dropped from 8 seconds to half a second – a massive reduction of 95%.
  • Availability of their customer’s website even during major events increased dramatically. Sardius now saves 77% of the time taken to scale from zero to 250,000 concurrent users.
  • Video Player load costs have been slashed by a massive 99.2% enabling Sardius to deliver exceptional value to their customers.
  • 2 petabytes Of video content streamed on average per month
  • 95% Reduction in page load times for their customers
  • 99.2% Reduction in video player load costs

"base2 has been great to work with. They provided a solution for us and for our customers that we can really count on. base2Services exceeded our expectations and our customers' expectations with what we have been able to deliver on top of that."

Jason Shore, Co-Founder and CEO

How AWS services were used to deliver for Sardius Media

  • AWS CodeDeploy is used in dev environments, enabling in-place deployments for fast developer feedback.
  • AWS CloudFormation is used to deploy and manage all environment specific AWS resources, providing the ability to deploy and maintain consistency across all production and non-production environments. Application deployments are also performed with CloudFormation.
  • Amazon EC2 & EC2 Container Service, the combination provides stable and reliable infrastructure to run and manage containers.
  • AWS Lambda is used for scheduled management tasks and application code. Packaged using serverless framework then coupled together with AWS CloudFormation to create 10 micro services.
  • Amazon S3 is used to store files, logs, images and static websites.
  • Amazon Glacier provides cheaper storage for infrequently used data such as logs and archived files.
  • Amazon RDS is used for primary database, the flexibility allows us to upgrade size and storage over time as the website usage grows.
  • Amazon VPC, each environment has it’s own VPC.
  • Amazon CloudFront is used as a global entry point to AWS - providing fast response websites for an international audience.
  • Amazon Route 53 is used for primary DNS, in conjunction with AWS CloudFormation to automate the creation.
  • Amazon CloudWatch is used as a monitoring and alerting system for instance stats and application logs.
  • AWS IAM is used for access management for users and AWS resources.
  • AWS Certificate Manager is used for SSL/TLS certificates with automated renewal.

Jason Shore, Co-Founder and CEO, Sardius Media, on their partnership with base2Services

Jason Shore, Co-Founder and CEO, Sardius Media, discusses how partnering with base2Services helped them to implement a DevOps process and maintain a system with 24/7 availability.

Duration: 2:01