How Molotov Makes You Love TV with Ynpact and AWS

Molotov, an internet TV channel distribution service, faced significant traffic increases during lockdowns that pushed its architecture to the limit. Migrating the multiple services that underpin Molotov to AWS, with the help of AWS Partner Ynpact, de-risked the system while enabling Molotov to evolve its DevOps culture.

Molotov is an internet TV channel distribution service that aims to bring together the various forms of TV consumption under a single interface: live, replay, video-on-demand (VOD), recording, streaming, and downloading.

Five years after its launch, Molotov offers the most advanced distribution and access to television content, with over 17 million users. Innovation is at the heart of the Molotov model: ergonomic and fluid interface, quality of service, advanced integration on all types of connected devices, and the most advanced features on the market.

To ensure all of these features, Molotov uses many services and APIs on its system, including identification and preferences. Until last year, Molotov operated an on-premises infrastructure. During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Molotov experienced significant traffic peaks, which its systems struggled to handle, sometimes leading to customers losing their connection.

“The existing architecture could not keep up," says Pablo Queixalos, vice president of engineering at Molotov. “Because of the containment, it was difficult to buy hardware and have it delivered to the data center. To support our growth, we had to accelerate the VOD migration.”

"We chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) in order to be as efficient as possible,” adds Queixalos. “Not only was AWS already available in Paris at the time, but it is one of the providers that offers the most services."

Crucially, the migration also helped Molotov evolve its DevOps culture, and above all to offer a fast service, which it could use to support the broadcasting of the Euro 2020 football matches.

Molotov became familiar with AWS Partner Ynpact through the AWS startup acceleration program. Attracted by its prior knowledge of the Over-the-Top (OTT) environment, Molotov engaged Ynpact for an initial project to identify a possible VOD solution based on AWS.

Given the urgency of the situation, and convinced by Ynpact's results and methods, Molotov turned to the AWS Partner to help with the migration, as it did not have enough resources to complete the migration internally.

The collaboration proved fruitful. “Ynpact's philosophy is to empower the customer," says Manuel Michel-Tur, chief executive officer (CEO) and acting chief acceleration officer at Ynpact. “When the project is over, the client is free to take over the project, and to continue to develop it."

This philosophy was followed throughout the project. "We collaborated a lot on the way we did things and our objectives, and Ynpact was very rigorous in terms of documentation and meeting deadlines," says Queixalos.

“The project was a challenge, because it was a large-scale and complex migration," says Michel-Tur. “Each service had its own problems.”

Another constraint was that the migration had to be carried out gradually, without interrupting traffic, and above all quickly. After agreeing on the architecture―based on Ynpact's recommendations from a previous project―the first step in the migration was to identify the fifty or so services and their interactions.

“This was the longest stage," says Benoît Sedoni, chief technology officer (CTO) at Ynpact. “Then we migrated the services that had no dependencies. It took several sprints to migrate the first service, but then we got faster and faster."

Each service runs on an Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) cluster, in containers using AWS CodeBuild. Elastic Load Balancing distributes the load between the applications, and Amazon CloudFront is used for content delivery. To facilitate the migration, Ynpact created modules on Terraform that were then reused for subsequent services. This ensured that the process would be repeatable, including by Molotov independently, while avoiding errors and meeting deadlines.

"The project had two stages: the migration of the infrastructure code and the application management pipelines; and then the activation (the switch to the migrated version of the service), which is spread out over time," says Queixalos.

At the end of the project, after 2 months, more than 70 percent of the services had been migrated, but not all of them were activated. Since then, Molotov has continued the migration, using the skills and tools it developed with Ynpact.

“Our product is heavily based on APIs," says Queixalos. “Each department has its own, very limited scope of responsibility.” But there is a lot of interaction between them, so technological evolution often requires modifying several services at the same time. Before, a team of four people was responsible for production; the developers didn't have the resources to do things differently. In order to scale up, the organization had to change.

Molotov wanted to create a framework in which developers could evolve to manage the infrastructure and lifecycle of the applications they were responsible for and, through this, to evolve the DevOps culture within the company. The choice was therefore made to put in place tools and practices for infrastructure development and application management that are flexible, multi-environment, secure, and accessible even to novices.

"Using AWS, we have created a workspace for each developer so that they can test their modifications without impacting the rest of the system," says Sedoni. To facilitate the change, the team used Terraform and tooling developed in-house, and interfaces that already existed on the previous Molotov platform. 

“Today, we are largely using DevOps," says Queixalos. “The developers are responsible for the production launch. They use the AWS tools and their workspaces daily.” This was a successful change, thanks to the involvement of Molotov's management and the thoroughness and richness of the documentation provided by Ynpact.

“We have succeeded in achieving all our objectives," says Queixalos. “The platform is de-risked, while bringing as many people as possible on board with the DevOps culture, ensuring security and controlling costs.”

Molotov now has an infrastructure that allows it to cope with large traffic peaks without degrading services. “The project was completed before the Euro 2020 football matches," says Queixalos. “And since we switched to AWS, we haven't had any crashes, thus ensuring the best user experience.”

Since the end of the migration with Ynpact, Molotov has migrated other services to AWS, and has built new services using the tools and methods developed with Ynpact. The other main area of work is refactoring, to make the most out of the cloud, and to increase efficiency and optimize costs.