K Sera Sera (KSS) is a major player in Indian cinema with integrated business spanning production and distribution of movies. Headquartered in Mumbai and commonly referred as KSS, the company focuses on entertainment film business producing a number of mega blockbusters. The company has three entities focusing on digital cinema roll out; building miniplex cinema screens and alternate content programming.
KSS has hosted its deployment in the AWS Cloud and engaged Umbrella as its Managed Service Provider to manage and optimize it for cost, performance and security.

KSera Sera

www.kserasera.com

01. Customer Challenge

In the film production and distribution business every film is a major project with massive financial investments riding on it. Movie distribution and revenue collection is critical to the success of the project—distribution takes movies to the audience and strategically extends the movie’s reach to masses in remote corners and turn them into mega blockbusters.

In the digital era technology plays a key role in empowering producers to use distribution as a differentiator—easily distribute and quickly extend reach.

To determine collection KSS needed to track movie screening and viewership as the business model is based on revenue sharing and tracking is easily achieved digitally.

Given the volume of new releases and vast distribution network KSS was facing performance issues. The customer needed a reliable system with zero downtime to assist business operations with automatic user authentication and quick download of copyrighted movies in a secure manner.

KSS existing workload on AWS Cloud was unable to scale effectively so it engaged Umbrella to design a high-performance infrastructure to facilitate its fast growth and provide continuous support.

02. AWS Services Used

03. Umbrella Solution

Umbrella conducted detailed assessment of existing infrastructure keeping in mind near-term and long-term business goals.
Next we redesigned the architecture to lay solid Cloud foundation wherein application and database layers were separated allowing to scale independently.

To protect copyrighted assets we set up VPN tunnels to enable secure download. The application installs a client at licensed users to authenticate, download and track details such as movie screening, number of tickets sold and viewership.
Umbrella team of certified experts modernized application to enable high performance—smooth movie download while extracting data from theatre owner’s premise.

As trusted MSP we optimized storage cost by configuring automated pipeline from Amazon S3—where the movies are stored for active download—to Amazon Glacier, a low-cost cold storage system on AWS, after active usage. We optimized performance by moving the application to a larger instance after observing the workload.

Deployments are continuously monitored by Amazon CloudWatch for metric-based performance while CloudHealth, a third-party tool monitors infrastructure to optimize for cost and performance.

04. Benefits