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base2Services helps Tuned Global engage millions of new customers through scalability and AWS

"Partnering with a DevOps company allowed us to develop faster without increasing our internal team, so we could spend more time focusing on user experience. We felt they could help us achieve real results."

Con Raso, Tuned Global Managing Director

A bit about Tuned Global

Tuned Global is a mobile engagement company that helps brands engage their customers through music. Their turnkey and branded music streaming apps, combined with innovative music business models and deep business intelligence allow brands and music labels to grow their business.

Tuned Global have worked on customer engagement campaigns with Australian brands such as Universal Music Group, Samsung Mobile, Coles and JB HI-FI, and are now focusing on growth with new clients across Japan, South-East Asia and Africa.

What Tuned Global needed

Tuned Global recognised that their current system was limited in scale and geography – the two essential elements needed to deliver to potentially hundreds of millions of monthly active users. Tuned Global knew they needed to adapt their current physical and Softlayer infrastructure to ensure their system could scale to cope with the demands of such a massive customer base.

They wanted to introduce automated deployments and scalability to their system – and migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to leverage infrastructure closer to the end customers. They also wanted to implement a DevOps approach and improve the way the music apps of their clients interact with the infrastructure. They needed a partner with the expertise to assist in the development and ongoing maintenance so that their team could develop faster and spend more time focusing on improving user experience and new product enhancements.

How base2Services delivered

During the initial 6-week migration phase to AWS, Tuned Global and base2Services worked to identify any bottlenecks and respond with necessary changes to the code, creating the infrastructure-as-code, building resilience and security from the start, and building out tests that would verify scaling. This created a significant uplift in the code base for Tuned Global.

With some music file uploads via Batch Jobs and sFTP possibly exceeding 7.2 TB per day, significant efforts were made to achieve the required upload capability. base2Services addressed this challenge by introducing a build pipeline, building a configuration management layer for the infrastructure, and enabling the rapid creation of multiple environments through the deployment pipeline, resulting in improved ingestion speeds by 10 times. To ensure this enhanced uploading capability, multiple scenarios of instance types and configuration changes were made over a rapid 1-week period.

Following the same collaborative approach as the initial migration, the entire solution has been migrated to AWS as part of ongoing enhancements, reducing the impact to the development team and improving the overall scalability, cost and performance of Tuned Global's system. All phases of the implementation, ongoing enhancements and ongoing 24/7 support and cloud management for Tuned Global have been provided as part of our DevOps as a Service offering.

See the impressive results

  • The introduction of DevOps principles and automation has reduced the impact to the development team and improved the overall scalability, cost and performance of the system.
  • Through close collaboration with Tuned Global, base2Services rapidly implemented the initial migration to budget over 6-weeks to ensure tight timelines were met.
  • Tuned Global were able to reduce the time needed to on-board new clients from 3-6 months to a couple of weeks. Moving from on-premises to AWS meant they no longer needed to speculate on network and compute requirements to achieve massive uploads and could just test configurations and make code changes to meet their customers' demanding service levels.
  • With the confidence and scalable framework to expand into new markets, Tuned Global signed a partnership with LINE MUSIC, a music streaming service integrated into Japan’s instant messaging service LINE, to deliver millions of songs to its 220 million global monthly users.
  • Tuned Global significantly reduced costs as a result of implementing DevOps principles, the uplift work and move to AWS. The automated build pipelines and ability to create new environments, able to be shut down on demand, has reduced the cost of development and testing by up to 70%.
  • 6 Weeks Initial Migration Timeline and Budget Met
  • 220m New Global Users Supported
  • Up To 70% Reduction in Cost of Development and Testing

"This partnership with base2Services and using AWS gives us the framework to deal with these mobile and music addicted markets. We feel we can continue to expand our business and we have great confidence in the team."

Con Raso, Tuned Global Managing Director

How AWS services were used to deliver for Tuned Global

  • AWS CloudFormation deploys and manages all environment specific AWS resources, delivering consistency across all production and non-production environments.
  • Amazon S3 centralises and decouples assets awaiting processing and delivery.
  • Amazon EFS is used by an autoscaling pool of SFTP instances to stage files for upload to S3.
  • Amazon RDS is used for SQL server deployment and management.
  • AWS Auto Scaling groups respond to additional load by dynamically scaling pools of EC2 instances.
  • AWS ELBs balance load across dynamic pools of stateless EC2 instances, so those services autoscale.
  • Amazon CloudWatch ships logs from autoscaling EC2 instances, centralising log management for a fleet of ephemeral compute resources.
  • AWS security groups and network ACLs in conjunction with a public/private subnet configuration provide network security and isolation.
  • Amazon CloudWatch alarms trigger autoscaling events based on EC2 resource usage metrics.
  • Amazon ElastiCache increases application performance by offloading database workload in a Redis cache.
  • Amazon Glacier gives long term, low cost archival of assets stored in S3 buckets.
  • AWS IAM roles allow EC2 instances with limited access to other AWS resources within the environment.
  • Other AWS services include: Amazon EBS, Amazon Route 53, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service.

Con Raso, Founder and Managing Director, Tuned Global

Con Raso, Founder and Managing Director of Tuned Global, shares how and why his company executed their transformation into AWS.

Duration: 1:58