How We Build This on AWS: Zafiro by Entertainment Solutions

Since 2006, Entertainment Solutions has developed and implemented interactive connectivity solutions that enhance the guest experience. The company specializes in providing services to hotels and has a presence in more than 100,000 rooms in over 60 countries. It also provides connectivity solutions for hospitals, stadiums, and airports. Entertainment Solutions’ mission is to be recognized as the best Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) technology provider in the world.

Zafiro by Entertainment Solutions is a modular ecosystem built upon Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud architecture that adapts to the needs of the hospitality environment by offering IPTV technology and interactive connectivity and entertainment services. I spoke to Santiago Pérez, System Architecture & DevOps Director at Entertainment Solutions to learn more about Zafiro.

Can you tell us a little bit about the Zafiro Cloud platform?
Zafiro is our cloud-native platform. We use this platform (Zafiro) to build solutions for the hospitality sector and improve the guest experience through technology. It includes a full reimagining of our IPTV system, Zafiro TV, our market-leading casting service, Zafiro Cast, and our feature-rich captive portal, Zafiro Wi-Fi. It also enables us to build synergies with phones and tablets using Zafiro Mobile.

We designed it from scratch using a service-oriented architecture and state-of-the-art technologies. We leveraged the following AWS managed services, which allowed us to reduce out administration overhead:

• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed service and certified Kubernetes conformant to run Kubernetes on AWS
• AWS IoT Core lets you connect billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and route trillions of messages to AWS services without managing infrastructure
• AWS Elemental MediaConvert transcodes file-based content into live stream assets quickly and reliably
• AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect apps and APIs against bots and exploits that consume resources, skew metrics, or cause downtime
• Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service built for high performance, security, and developer convenience.

We were also able to reuse internal elements such as an on-premises GitLab environment that integrated perfectly with Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), a fully managed Docker container registry, and Amazon EKS.

Can you tell us about your Cloud Migration Journey? What was the main challenge?
The main challenge was, without a doubt, taking the first step. We had been working on a monolithic platform for a decade, and our attempts to dip our toes into cloud technologies were unsuccessful. Only when we decided to take the plunge and fully commit, everything started to fall into place. The AWS team helped us get an understanding on how its services work and shared best practices for designing the architecture.

You decided to modify the architecture to work with microservices. Can you tell us why you went in that direction?
We already had a robust customer base. Our initial system design needed to scale from a few thousand end users to several millions without major changes, while being fully redundant and highly available at the same time. The Service Oriented Architecture paradigm, based in the orchestration of microservices, is right at the intersection of elasticity and high availability.

What were the main challenges or blockers to do this?
Our previous preferred technologies and languages were not adequate for this kind of architecture. We had to retrain every developer and start from scratch in many areas, from new compilers and image builders to new data abstraction layers, which took a lot of time. However, we approached this as a natural step in modernizing our tech stack and, although it was one of our main challenges, I would not consider it a real blocker.

What was the main advantage of these architecture changes?
One of the first things we realized was, that many of what we thought were restrictions, were actually helping us enforce best practices: everything had to be modular, secure and scalable.

Moreover, having AWS as a partner allowed us to take advantage of technologies, which gave us exactly what we wanted: the ability to test drive new features, start small and risk-free, coupled with the capacity to grow the system to any size we would require later on.

How else has AWS powered operational efficiency?
Working with AWS is a real breeze, every procedure is perfectly documented, and I can’t recall any kind of setback using AWS tools.

AWS provides everything you may ever need to set up not only a Kubernetes cluster, but everything you require in terms of development, deployment or monitoring. Plus, everything works together seamlessly. With minimal setup, you are a few clicks away of leveraging services like Amazon CloudFront or AWS Shield.

Can you tell me about your work with Paradores?
Yes, we are working now with Paradores, the highest rated Spanish hotel brand according to Brand Finance. Its priority for 2022 was to implement new technologies in its hotels. The decision to opt for Entertainment Solutions was determined mainly by the differentiated characteristics of our solutions. In particular, the centralised management of all properties from a single manager, which is one of the benefits of being on the cloud.

With these technologies in place, guests at Paradores properties can feel like they have the comforts of home, with the ability to enjoy their own content thanks to Zafiro Cast or the speediness of a good Wi-Fi solution.

In what other ways do your customers benefit from your cloud-based architecture?
Working with AWS means we don’t have to compromise. We are able to offer the best possible solution to our customers while we continuously experiment and develop new technology to improve the guest experience.

Our system is now easier than ever to deploy and manage, and with a cloud solution we are able to build corporate features that would be impossible otherwise. We used to update the systems with new functionalities and improvements twice a year and now we update the platform every three weeks with no downtime, automatically and transparently, with great operational benefits and savings for our customers.

To learn more about how AWS helps the travel and hospitality industry improve the traveler and guest experience, visit aws.com/travel.