Broadband TV | Onica

Onica  worked really closely with the development team to design and implement a secure virtual network using Amazon’s VPC service and deploy services like ELB to limit access to internal servers, while allow for scale in the future. The deployment of the products coming online at the time was scripted to take advantage of Elastic Beanstalk and RDS, reducing the pain for deploying to a complex clustered environment and removing the most typical tasks for maintaining and operating the environment, while making it easy to scale.

To aid the need for visibility how the environment is performing, Onica brought in a number of monitoring tools and ensured their deployment worked well within the auto-scaling design principle applied to all stacks. This turned out to be invaluable in closely managing the performance of the products while being conscious of the infrastructure cost.

As BBTV’s products like VISO Catalyst were successfully rolled out to all BBTV partners, the need to process massive amounts of videos and speed up the on-boarding process of new partners led to the deployment of more products that had to perform extremely fast. Cost was a major risk for the company and lots of design thoughts went into designing the deployment to be able to take advantage of the AWS spot pricing and reduce the bandwidth for moving data in and out of the network. Onica and BBTV have been able to architect a highly de-coupled solution using spot instances and Amazon SQS workers to process around half a million YouTube videos in a few weeks for a fraction of the cost it would take to do that with one of the largest instances available if the product was run on it in the same way it was tested internally before the release.