How Hungama Digital uses Amazon’s cloud optimisation tool to significantly improve resource utilisation and save costs
Hungama Digital Media Entertainment is a leading content aggregator, developer, publisher and distributor of Bollywood and South Asian entertainment content to consumers across the globe. The company also designs and builds mobile entertainment products for various telcos in India.
This means that the company hosts a vast amount of digital content that needs to be available 24×7—something that can only happen if the company has an IT infrastructure that is always up and running and can scale according to the dynamic requirements of the market.
That is precisely where Hungama Digital was facing a challenge—and that is where its move to the cloud comes into the picture.
Explains Amit Vora, CTO, Hungama Digital Media Entertainment Pvt Ltd, “Prior to migrating to the cloud, we ran our servers in local data centres. This was time-consuming and extremely expensive. We required quick turnaround times, but the old equipment and local servers caused delays in implementation and service launches.”
As an answer to its infrastructure woes, Hungama adopted Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2008. The aim was to take advantage of the cloud’s cost effectiveness, flexibility and improved time-to-market.
Sailing through
According to Vora, migrating to AWS has helped the company experience several benefits. The cloud service allows Hungama to quickly ramp up its enterprise server, computing power and storage resources with just a few clicks.
Says Vora, “This means we are able to provision for unexpected traffic and do away with any excess idle capacity. Being able to support sudden spurts in traffic means that our servers are never down and we are able to provide quality service to our customers.”
“The freed up resources also allow us to accelerate our innovation process and reduce our time to market for services. We are also able to focus more on growing our business,” he adds.
Vora explains that the pay-as-you-go model has been extremely helpful in reducing costs. Adopting the cloud has driven down the company’s IT costs considerably, and helped Hungama achieve upto 35% cost savings.
Today, Hungama Digital uses AWS for all its direct-to-customer services. The company has partnerships with hundreds of content creators, record labels, studios, broadcasters, and game publishers, and has licensed digital rights to nearly one-and-a-half million music and video titles.
As such, the company needs a large amount of scalable storage. It uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon S3 hosts more than 60 terabytes of the company’s content.
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Fine tuning the infrastructure
Having reaped the benefits of the cloud, Hungama Digital was looking to optimise its cloud usage. Its growing content storage requirements and the need to ensure optimum utilisation, prompted an introspection into its infrastructure on the cloud and the way it was being monitored and managed. One challenge was that the management tools it had in place in the beginning, did not meet its requirements after a point. Therefore, looking for a more granular way of monitoring and managing the infrastructure, the company moved to Amazon’s AWS Trusted Advisor tool.
Talking about the migration to this tool, Vora says, “Before using AWS Trusted Advisor, we monitored our infrastructure through an open source tool, Nagios. But Nagios did not support computation of costs that would help us perform our cost analysis and estimation. However, this is available in AWS Trusted Advisor.”
The AWS Asia Pacific team introduced Hungama Digital to the AWS Trusted Advisor service as part of a package Amazon offers to its enterprise-level customers. Looking at the features and benefits it promises, Hungama decided to go ahead and use the service.
Explaining how the service has made a difference, Vora says, “The AWS Trusted Advisor service helps us assess our AWS environment and make recommendations when opportunities exist to save money, improve system performance, or close security gaps.”
“It gives a dashboard view of our AWS cloud platform usage and provides our management, complete visibility into the usage of hardware, helping us make quicker and better decisions on hardware requirements. We have been able to save 33% of our costs in addition to the savings we already enjoy.”
Drilling down into how the service helps Hungama manage its infrastructure better, Vora says that the AWS Trusted Advisor looked at the instance utilisation history and recommended optimisation strategies based on instance type. The company realised that its development teams were over-provisioning instance sizes, which were running at very low utilisation levels.
Additionally, the audit revealed that the development and test servers used for special projects were not shut down once the projects were finished. The audit team used this information to select the right instance size for oversized instances. They also categorised production and development servers and automated the process of shutting down development servers during non-business hours.
There were other benefits as well. Prior to running AWS Trusted Advisor, Hungama Digital had purchased Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances. The Reserved Instance Optimisation check feature from the service, which looks at billing and instance utilisation history, helped the company identify additional opportunities for optimisation. After reviewing this data, says Vora, his team decided to reserve production and development servers for heavy and medium utilisation based on instance.
“We also used the underutilised Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Volumes check to review utilisation history for Amazon EBS volumes. The check identified a number of unused or underutilised EBS volumes that were often left over from previous test projects. It highlighted volumes that we were paying for but not accessing regularly. As a result, the audit team created snapshots, which they stored on Amazon S3, and then deleted the volumes. This action also resulted in a reduction of over 90% on the number of snapshots generated weekly,” says Vora.
Looking beyond optimisation
Besides the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of a cloud service, what concerns most enterprises is how the service aligns with their governance, regulation and compliance requirements. This aspect can, in fact, make or break deals between cloud service providers and enterprises. Vora explains that using AWS Identity & Access Management (IAM), Hungama Digital is able to align all its user management policies with AWS and thereby manage and control the cloud infrastructure based on its governance policies.
“Also, using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), we are managing our infrastructure on AWS cloud and connect with them over a secure channel, thereby implementing our governance policies without any issues,” he says.
He concludes by saying, “We will continue leveraging the features and checks of the AWS Trusted Advisor to further optimise our infrastructure and costs. With the cost savings realised from the initial audit, we plan to continue to implement the AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations for hardening, extending fault tolerance and improving the performance of our environment.”