BrightLine Reduces Costs by over 70% Using AWS Services

BrightLine knows the importance of maintaining a connected and efficient infrastructure as it creates, delivers, and measures dynamic ads across broadcasting services. Over time, the complex infrastructure that BrightLine built using its former cloud provider became difficult to maintain cost effectively. The company migrated its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to improve scalability, increase efficiency, and reduce costs.

BrightLine is an advertising company that delivers interactive television solutions for brands. In 2021, the company migrated from a solution built on Microsoft Azure using a .NET application to AWS in 6 months. “Compared to our previous cloud provider, the day-to-day operations are a lot easier,” says Jason McGowan, vice president of engineering at BrightLine. “The built-in scaling and tools work right out of the box on AWS.”

BrightLine started by migrating its highest-cost service, its data warehouse, to Amazon Redshift, which uses SQL to analyze structured and semistructured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes, using AWS-designed hardware and machine learning. As part of this effort, BrightLine also migrated its .NET application clusters to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for Windows, which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, and its database instances to Amazon RDS for SQL Server, which makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale Microsoft SQL Server deployments in the cloud.

Advertising depends on data, so having its data warehouse and campaign data—which is used to create meaningful metrics the company can use—on a connected solution was critical. After successfully migrating its data warehouse, BrightLine wanted to migrate its database quickly to Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database designed to run high-performance applications at any scale. As part of that migration, it also started using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. BrightLine met weekly with the AWS account team and the Windows team at AWS (including its solutions architect) to accomplish these projects on a short timeline. “Everyone at AWS had great attitudes, was willing to help, and gave good technical suggestions,” says McGowan.

By migrating its infrastructure to AWS, BrightLine boosted customer satisfaction, improved cost transparency, and reduced its monthly costs by over 70 percent compared to its previous cloud provider. BrightLine and its customers benefit from the more scalable and efficient services. “Our customers see that our services are running more efficiently and there’s less downtime, which was an issue with our previous solution,” says McGowan. With these cost savings, BrightLine can invest in other opportunities that deliver customer impact. “We’ve been able to scale our team and move faster to grow our business and create our products because of the cost savings from using AWS,” says McGowan.

Now that BrightLine is nearly all in on AWS, the company plans to focus its efforts on reporting optimization. To provide custom dashboards to its media partners, BrightLine wants to update queries and procedures and work with its data warehouse. “Having a scalable solution and knowing exactly how it works helps us to scale our products better, operate more efficiently, and generate application product business,” says McGowan.