Prima Group Boosts Streaming Uptime and Creates Platform for Growth on AWS

To keep customers satisfied, and support growth of its iPrima streaming service, Prima Group decided to move to a cloud setup built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). By doing this, it could benefit from managed services, modernize its monolithic applications, and improve scaling. iPrima’s previous IT setup relied on a hosting service using a small number of bare-metal servers. With future growth in mind, the company chose AWS to help it increase the stability and availability of its streaming platform. This was essential to Prima Group, so it could scale to meet traffic peaks, provide a good customer experience, and support the introduction of new subscriber models.

Prima Group began by moving its streaming platform databases and applications to AWS as part of a two-phase project, completing the migration in 5 months. The new setup meant 50 percent fewer people were needed for infrastructure maintenance, so more of the IT team could focus on higher-value tasks such as product development.

Using AWS, Prima Group has been able to scale its iPrima platform by a factor of 10, helping it increase content availability and serve more users at the same time. “If users note any issues with our streaming service, we get complaints, plus we risk upsetting our advertisers,” says Marek Kouřimský, chief of development at Prima Group. “We now have a stable and reliable service and feel assured we can grow without issues.”

The first part of Prima Group’s modernization process has been to containerize applications to increase platform stability and support further scaling. For this, it is using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed container service to run and scale Kubernetes applications in the cloud or on-premises.

By building on AWS, Prima Group was able to get its Kubernetes clusters up and running in just 14 days, compared with the 2 years it took previously. “Our hosting company spent a long time to get Kubernetes clusters into production—even then, they weren’t in proper working order,” says Kouřimský. “It’s hard to start from scratch when developing Kubernetes, and there are not many people who are proficient in it. With AWS, you can simply click and have clusters available quickly—plus, as a managed service, all the painful administration parts are managed automatically.”

Prima Group also uses AWS for its news website—operated in partnership with CNN—to speed up image loading times, making the process 1.5 times faster than before. It uses Amazon CloudFront, which securely delivers content with low latency and high transfer speeds. “We’ve been very impressed with this service, and we are now looking at using it for video files,” adds Kouřimský.

The company is now working on its next stage of modernization to connect internal and external services and minimize manual processes. For this, it is using Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) to securely stream data with a fully managed, highly available Apache Kafka service. “We can now manage new subscribers more easily,” says Kouřimský. “Instead of manually creating an event when a new user comes on board, the system change is automatic.”

Using AWS, Prima Group’s streaming platform is set for growth. “Managing our infrastructure is much easier, plus now we scale infinitely and keep our streaming customers happy,” says Kouřimský. “This gives us total peace of mind for the future of our streaming service.”