AWS Case Study: Tubaah/NDTV

To build Tubaah, NDTV Convergence partnered with Tekriti Software, a software development company focusing on Web 2.0 deployments, social software, media management solutions, and more. When NDTV Convergence first approached Tekriti about the project, the Tekriti team knew they would deploy it on AWS. Tekriti already had several successful deployments on AWS, including TekMedia, SocialWorld, and Frontside.

Manish Dhingra, Founder and COO, shares the story, “From the day the project started, it was apparent that Tubaah would need the ability to scale infinitely to cater to the huge demand for online video. Besides this, true to the nature of the television industry, it needed to be always on with enough redundancy in place. Moreover, the platform had to be a stable publishing platform to enable publishing of several thousand videos each day.”

“Amazon Web Services and more specifically Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) were chosen as the infrastructure solutions to build the Tubaah platform. Based on our experiences using AWS to run TekMedia (which powers the backend of Tubaah), we utilized a similar architecture to create a redundant scalable system at an inexpensive cost.”

Tekriti Software pioneered the end to end, design, development, deployment and release of the Tubaah platform on AWS. Since Tekriti had already built TekMedia on the AWS stack, they were confident that the application would scale when a traffic surge occurred, as in a “breaking news scenario.”

Tekriti and NDTV were attracted to AWS’s cost savings and reliability. Dhingra continues, “Because of the billing model of AWS, what originally would have been a CAPEX became an OPEX, which could easily be tallied to monetization against page views. The concept of Reserved Instances made it very easy to save on these instances and helps to ensure their availability. Also, since storage on Amazon S3 was of no concern, we only had to focus on the core part of the strategy, which is creating great content. The AWS cloud architecture considerably reduced the time period of procurement of hardware, while at the same time providing reliability of service delivery.”

The outcome has been positive. Since Tekriti had a few years of experience working with AWS, they were able to quickly setup the required infrastructure in two days post site build and launch end-to-end in a period of 3 months. More important, the customer is happy: “Using AWS has given us a lot of flexibility in terms of scaling our hardware based on our day-to-day requirements, which change due to the nature of product. Some of the reasons why we like AWS are scalability, reliability, and the detailed reporting available to us. Since Tubaah.com, we have launched two more sites on the AWS platform including our own social platform NDTVSocial.com and one of India’s foremost financial portals NDTVProfit.com” says Kawaljit Singh Bedi, CTO at NDTV Convergence Ltd.

Based on the success of Tubaah.com, NDTVSocial.com, and NDTVProfit.com, NDTV has moved its core site, www.ndtv.com , to AWS as well.Using a video management system, which runs on AWS, the site processes over 20 million video requests per month. In addition, the site also offers mobile streaming, which is done with Wowza using Amazon EC2.

Dhingra concludes, “We thank Amazon for the wonderful experience and the peace of mind their services offer. We can now sleep easy, we do not have to worry about scaling the infrastructure, and our sales team can go about acquiring customers without worrying about scalability of the solution.”

http://www.tubaah.com

http://www.tekritisoftware.com