The company achieves financial and performance optimization via CloudFront and Lightstream Cloud Managed Services
Business Challenge
A budding streaming content and production studio with a growing number of subscribers based throughout the world is dedicated to providing customers with the best viewing experience possible while keeping an eye on its bottom line. Company leadership made the right choice in utilizing content delivery networks, or CDNs, to take advantage of their high availability and performance benefits. CDNs put the streaming content physically closer to subscribers via a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers.
The company had many of its workloads housed in AWS but was using a competing CDN provider to deliver its streaming content. Around 2016, it became evident to the organization’s leadership that they were spending an exorbitant amount on CDN services. Moreover, performance in certain areas of the world wasn’t as fast or efficient as it could be due to the nature of the CDN provider’s edge locations. On the brink of launching a new global streaming series, the company was looking for new ways to streamline content delivery as well as improve the day-to-day management of its multi-cloud environment.
Solution
Lightstream’s specialized engineers analyzed the company’s AWS environment against technical and operational best practices and identified areas for financial, operational and security optimization. Lightstream is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and provides the company with ongoing cloud advisory services through its Cloud Managed Services offering.
With the launch of the new streaming series in mind, it was determined that part of the financial and performance optimization involved creating a pathway from the company’s original CDN to Amazon CloudFront to accommodate large data transfer at a lower cost and integrating it with other AWS services. Lightstream worked with the company to understand the benefits of switching to CloudFront for the streaming series’ future traffic, which delivers content to end users with lower latency using a global network of 225+ Points of Presence (215+ Edge locations and 13 regional mid-tier caches) in 90 cities across 47 countries. Using CloudFront on AWS lowers customers’ data-out charges in comparison with competitors. It also leverages Amazon’s highly resilient, fully redundant, global backbone network for superior performance and availability for end users.
Partnering with Lightstream for CMS also allows the company to tap into Lightstream’s expertise on the latest and greatest AWS offerings. AWS is constantly adding new capabilities so users can leverage cutting-edge technologies to experiment and innovate more quickly. Staying on top of this became burdensome and time consuming for the company’s in-house IT professionals. With Lightstream Cloud Managed Services, a team of cloud and security experts helps continually optimize the financial, security, technology, and operational aspects of a company’s AWS cloud. When specific issues like CDN optimization arise, the Lightstream team is already on hand to recommend best practices and drive successful outcomes.
Business Outcomes
Since CloudFront is an AWS solution, the service is bundled into the company’s overall AWS usage. Supported by Lightstream, this gave the organization leverage to negotiate better rates than it had been paying with its previous CDN. CloudFront’s cost-efficient and customizable pay-as-you-go model resulted in greater financial optimization since the company no longer had to pay high data-out transfer fees to deliver the new streaming series globally.
With Lightstream, the company was able to successfully re-route the streaming series’ content to CloudFront. Thanks to the success of the series, CloudFront’s monthly usage has grown from 2 PB to 10 PB without an exponential increase in cost the company would have experienced with the competitor’s CDN. CloudFront’s global network of edge locations has also improved content delivery and performance to certain areas of the world. Its flexibility enables the company to easily scale up and down with subscriber demand.
With Lightstream Cloud Managed Services, a team of experts consistently analyzes the company’s technology spend and performance and guides them toward greater financial savings as well as enhanced operational and security measures.
Contact Information
To find out how Lightstream can help your business implement Amazon CloudFront and integrate it with other AWS services or to learn more about how Lightstream Cloud Managed Services can support the successful migration and optimization of your cloud environments, fill out the information-request form on this page.
