LAMDA Development Builds Efficient Media Asset Library with LCM Go Cloud on AWS

Greece-based LAMDA Development is working on the first phase of The Ellinikon, a 5-year mission that involves building on a huge scale. The project is a redevelopment of Athens’ old international airport covering over 6.2 million square meters. LAMDA Development has responsibility for the entire redevelopment.

LAMDA Development decided that it would record videos of the evolution of the project. “The recordings are used for the company’s communication needs on social media and in commercial and promotional material,” says Panagiotis Charalampous, multimedia content senior associate at LAMDA Development. “There are also plans to create documentary films about the project.” Originally, the company was storing the video files on hard disk drives, but it soon found itself with eight drives containing hundreds of thousands of files and 60 TB of data. This was cumbersome to work with and difficult to share.

LAMDA Development’s IT and marketing teams recognized the need to develop a secure and durable platform for uploading, storing, and categorizing media assets. The teams wanted lifecycle management and the ability to control access and admin rights granted to internal users and third-party teams. “We needed to give access in a way that was easy to use and secure,” says George Rossiades, systems operations and infrastructure senior manager at LAMDA Development. “We estimated that we would produce about 80–100 TB yearly. We needed a simple and secure solution for the viewing, searching and selecting, retrieving, sharing, and editing of these videos in a highly efficient and cost-effective way.”

With each hard drive storing up to 200,000 videos—most of which were short clips—the company was concerned about the reliability, accessibility, and security of its solution. LAMDA Development initially considered an on-premises option for storing and managing its video but dismissed this as too expensive and troublesome to manage. “It was clear that on premises was not the right way to go,” says Rossiades. “We saw the cloud as the way to get what we wanted and have the flexibility we needed to keep growing. We put out an RFP and LCM Go Cloud was one of the companies that responded.”

The company received multiple proposals and chose to build its solution on AWS with AWS Partner LCM Go Cloud, an Athens-based consultancy. The proposal included a functional proof-of-concept, demonstrating to LAMDA Development what LCM Go Cloud could do. “It was important to us to show that we understood the work,” says Costas Kappos, managing partner and co-founder at LCM Go Cloud. “LAMDA Development has a mature and capable IT department and a marketing team that knew the results it wanted. So we created a proposal that highlighted the benefits of working with us on AWS.”

Being able to work together was important to the success of the project. LAMDA Development and LCM Go Cloud did that by specifying responsibilities for the project and arranged for regular communications. “It was a small team from LAMDA Development, just a few of us,” says Rossiades. “We needed LCM Go Cloud to be focused and responsive, and they were. They work on a very human scale. If you need someone, you can reach them, and they listen. It was a very pleasant experience.”

The solution involved using AWS Snowball, which companies can use to easily migrate terabytes of data to the cloud without limits in storage capacity or compute power. To store LAMDA Development’s accumulated videos online, LCM Go Cloud used Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. The videos are converted and optimized using AWS Elemental MediaConvert, a file-based video transcoding service with broadcast-grade features. Video content is quickly available to those who need it using Amazon CloudFront—a content delivery network (CDN) service built for high performance, security, and developer convenience. “It used to take more time to find and share material with our partners,” says Charalampous. “Now it's very easy to search, retrieve, and share this material, quickly and efficiently directly through the media management platform.” The company is also looking at implementing Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes—long-term, secure, durable storage classes for data archiving—to archive less-frequently accessed videos and optimize costs.

It took only 8 months to develop the media management system—from the selection of LCM Go Cloud to the system going live. In the first 2 weeks of use, LAMDA Development uploaded about 60 TB of videos to the system, and it expects the volume of videos to continue to grow as work on The Ellinikon continues.

LAMDA Development already had a good categorization system in place before the move to AWS and is continuing to build on that. “The speed we get with this new system is great,” says Rossiades. “It lets any authorized user access video content from anywhere. But with hundreds of thousands of video clips, we need to build on our strong categorization and tagging to ensure that continues. We’re looking forward to what artificial intelligence can do.” Charalampous agrees, saying, “It would be great to have an AI system that would help the user both in archiving and searching levels.”

Working with LCM Go Cloud, LAMDA Development has built a resilient and secure system to manage its media storage and deliver content, and it has done so smoothly. “I’m just proud of the whole result, not only from a technical perspective, but also the collaboration with stakeholders in LAMDA Development and with LCM Go Cloud,” says Rossiades. “Sometimes, when you’re just working with technical stuff, it can be very difficult, but this was not the case. This was something I looked forward to working on. LCM Go Cloud and AWS is working very well for us.”