One of India’s Largest Film Entertainment Companies Achieves Zero Downtime with AWS Migration
India’s largest film entertainment company, founded in 1997, offers a wide range of cinema formats. With leading edge technology such as IMAX, 4DX and Enhanced Cinema Experience (ECX) and other formats adding up to 15 exclusive screens, the company owns a prominent cinema subsidiary.
With several sub brands to its credit, the popular film exhibition company has more than 800 screens spread out among 173 locations in 71 cities.
As a leading entertainment brand, the cinema subsidiary with an online ticket distribution service must make sure that customer facing apps operate smoothly with zero downtime. Efficient program management is crucial, along with quick disaster recovery and agility. With their rapid and consistent expansion, the business requires high availability and scalability as well.
The company with their legacy systems was looking for solutions to migrate to the cloud so that they could offer an enhanced customer experience concurrent with their brand and quality.
AWS and Umbrella consistently presented compelling reasons as to how they could help the company achieve their goal to experiment with new technology and move to a platform that would accommodate uptime.
01. AWS Services
- AWS application load balancer enabling autoscaling
- AWS RDS for ease of database management and high availability
- EC2, VPC, Direct Connect, S3 and Cloudwatch
- Lambda Functions, AWS CloudTrail & AWS Config
- CloudFormation, AWS System Manager
Client Challenges
- On prem setup with complex infrastructure
- Limitations with scalability & availability
- Longer downtime and slow disaster recovery
- Difficulties with adding new functionalities
Umbrella-AWS Solutions
- Ease of management, maintaining and ramping up infrastructure
- Scalability to accommodate large booking loads and high availability
- Zero downtime with instant disaster recovery
- Ability to add new functionalities easily and go to market faster
02. Challenges And The Umbrella-AWS Pilot
In the existing setup, the cinema service was dependent on an on-premise setup that did not allow them to scale easily for accommodating growing traffic. Ramping up infrastructure for ticketing services during blockbuster movie releases was a mammoth task. The various gateways for tickets and services also faced downtime for long hours that compromised customer satisfaction. The company needed to ensure near 100% uptime and smooth functioning of all sites and apps with least disruption. They also needed quick disaster recovery in the event of a failure so that critical functions would remain unaffected.
The business was spending too much time on maintaining, managing and ramping up infrastructure which was driving up costs. They were missing out on ease of use and all the efforts going into the infrastructure were not bringing in any value. The team was unable to focus on adding new functionalities on their website. They were looking for a cloud solution that would help them address all these problems
03. Umbrella's Solution for the Film Based Service Provider
The company considered AWS-Umbrella to help them with the challenges. As a Pilot, Umbrella first established Disaster Recovery for their Navision ERP on AWS environment. This helped the entertainment giant realise the benefits of enhanced security, ease of management, self-service, scalability and elasticity associated with AWS environment. Confident that they would clearly benefit from AWS migration they decided to move all their web and mobile apps to AWS in early 2019.
Umbrella came up with a migration plan after a detailed discussion on which apps to move, how to move them and costs involved. Critical customer facing apps that process ticket booking and related operations for multiple brands, apps with data and analysis functionalities and their luxury line that requires high availability were all moved to AWS in a phased manner.
04. Technology & Approach Used
A combination of the replatforming and lift and shift approaches were used for migrating the apps that were on multiple platforms like Java, Linux/Unix and MSSQL. One of the apps, for instance, was on DOTNET and Windows platform with MSSQL Standard database. Umbrella team provided the infrastructure designing and deployment while the company’s team took care of app deployment. Load balancing and auto scaling helped the client achieve high availability and scalability. Near 100% uptime was achieved with two availability zones.
05. Result
The film based service company has come a long way from their struggles with an outdated infrastructure, longer downtime in ticketing processes and difficulties in scaling up during mass events and promotions. AWS migration has empowered them with nearly 100% availability and zero downtime. They have reduced go to market time by 50% and major releases now are business as usual. The company is also able to bring in new features quickly and process nearly thousands of orders per second. Managed services ensure advanced security and compliance and superior quality and delivery.
Umbrella was effectively able to understand the large B2C’s concerns and provide AWS solutions that addressed their challenges helping them move to more progressive and adaptive technology. The large film entertainment business is empowered by customer service excellence and maximum uptime with reliable failover.
