LimonCloud Engages AWS Distributor Tech Data to Expand Reach, Improve Services

LimonCloud joined the AWS Partner Network and engaged AWS Distributor Tech Data to specialize in the cloud and better serve its customers. By becoming an AWS Partner, LimonCloud expanded its reach to new regions and gained access to marketing, funding, and a direct line to AWS experts for support. LimonCloud then helped media company S Sport Plus migrate to AWS to optimize costs, performance, and availability for end users of its website and mobile app.

As the information technology (IT) sector became increasingly focused on the cloud, IT and cloud services provider LimonCloud realized it needed to specialize in cloud services to better serve customers and achieve sustainable growth. To differentiate itself, the company of 22 employees joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network in 2019. It was onboarded to the program by AWS Distributor Tech Data. 

“We were aware of the advantages, services, market size, and customer needs that could be provided or met by AWS,” says Nurdamla Van Leeuwen, Cloud Account Manager at LimonCloud. “The world is becoming more cloud based, especially in the IT sector. LimonCloud needed to be a part of that.” 

As an AWS Partner, LimonCloud became known for simple-to-use, scalable cloud solutions. By using AWS services and partnering with Tech Data, LimonCloud was well positioned to help S Sport Plus, Turkey’s sports-only over-the-top video service, reduce costs and build a highly available, scalable infrastructure that significantly improved performance for end users.

Based in Turkey and founded in 2009, LimonCloud helps small and midsize businesses, startups, enterprises, and greenfield projects architect solutions, migrate, and optimize infrastructure and applications on AWS, while also offering managed services. The company is an AWS Partner and a reseller through the AWS Distribution Program, which enables AWS Partners to grow revenue opportunities by reselling AWS products and solutions. It also participates in APN Immersion Days, which offer AWS Advanced and Premier Consulting Partners access to workshop content and tools developed by AWS solutions architects and packages it for AWS Partners to use exclusively with their customers. In 2020, LimonCloud received the designation of AWS Rising Star Partner of the Year – Turkey for embracing specialization and collaboration and helping customers drive innovation and build solutions on AWS.

Becoming an AWS Partner and working with Tech Data has enabled LimonCloud to expand to new regions and reach more customers that have been hesitant to migrate to the cloud. As an AWS Distributor in Turkey, Tech Data accelerates the reach and consumption of AWS and supports business partners with marketing, enablement, and knowledge about AWS capabilities. “The only way of reaching a big market is if customers benefit from your services anytime, anywhere in the world,” says Kaan Bayram, Business Development Manager of Next-Generation Technologies at Tech Data. “AWS Partners such as LimonCloud make customers’ lives simple in the journey to AWS. They convert AWS solutions to business solutions by adding their expertise and knowledge. In the AWS Distribution Program, we focus on partners’ sustainable growth and business success.” 

When the local hosting companies that S Sport Plus relied on couldn’t handle its unpredictable spikes in traffic, LimonCloud’s position as an AWS Partner enabled it to help. S Sport Plus is a website and mobile application on which subscribers can watch sport events from internationally known premium sports organizations such as the Premier League, LaLiga Santander, and the National Basketball Association. It offers more than 300 hours of live streaming monthly, along with various on-demand content. Quality of service is paramount to S Sport Plus’s subscribers, yet the application’s instance type was highly used, and it had no backups or standby replicas for high availability.

LimonCloud started working with S Sport Plus at the beginning of 2020, helping it migrate to AWS and create a new architecture. Before the migration, LimonCloud built several proofs of concept and conducted stress tests and scenarios to determine the best architectural design. That testing included disruption of operation, technology issues, natural disasters, and unlikely events such as high traffic issues. S Sport Plus migrated to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL when the testing determined that it was the best solution. MySQL is popular worldwide as an open source relational database, and Amazon RDS makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale MySQL deployments in the cloud. Through the efficiency of Amazon RDS instances, LimonCloud has helped S Sport Plus decrease costs for subscribers by 56 percent. 

Becoming an AWS Partner with the support of Tech Data has enabled LimonCloud to deliver more advanced solutions and help S Sport Plus realize key benefits. “It’s amazing to be an AWS Partner because we can get information about new services or help with a project for our customers directly from the Technical Account Managers or Solutions Architects at AWS,” says Van Leeuwen. “We can get AWS Partner Network marketing funding for projects that create more brand awareness for our customer and AWS. We can also provide our customers with a starting point for a project using credits from AWS.” 

For high availability and disaster recovery, S Sport Plus relies on the automated backup feature of Amazon RDS, which enables point-in-time recovery for a database instance, which means that the application can restore its database instance to any second during its retention period, up to the last 5 minutes. S Sport Plus also uses Amazon RDS to automatically create a storage volume snapshot of its database instance, backing up the entire database instance. S Sport Plus now uses Amazon RDS T3 Instances (db.t3.small), which are Multi-AZ enabled, so their data can be replicated to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone. 

LimonCloud helped S Sport Plus drop utilization of Amazon RDS instances to below 10 percent, even in peak traffic during events such as the Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix, using Amazon ElastiCache, which enables companies to seamlessly set up, run, and scale popular open-source compatible in-memory data stores in the cloud. It can improve the performance of databases by retrieving data from high-throughput and low-latency in memory data stores. That helps S Sport Plus meet unpredictable traffic requirements. Also helping to boost the application’s performance is Amazon CloudFront, a fast content delivery network service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency and high transfer speeds.

On AWS and as an AWS Partner, LimonCloud has been able to expand its reach and offer customers reliable, cost-effective, high-performing solutions. “Now that LimonCloud has become an AWS Partner,” Van Leeuwen says, “we are going to get more advantages from that and do more projects on AWS.”