Launching streaming services in 15 minutes on AWS with Vimond

Originally offering traditional content management solutions, Vimond has been expanding its platform to include live and on-demand video content and monetization capabilities. To keep pace with market changes, Vimond needed to transform its on-premises infrastructure.

Vimond’s engineers spent most of their time patching the company’s legacy systems to scale its platform to large-scale live events and an expansive library of video content. Further, the company wanted to reduce the overhead involved with deploying new services. In doing so, Vimond could continue to offer cost-effective streaming and content management solutions to enterprises with limited resources.

With the goal of transforming its backend, Vimond initially migrated its workloads to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. “Our teams don’t have to reinvent the wheel with the stable, comprehensive infrastructure services from AWS,” says Matteo Remo Luzzi, engineering lead at Vimond. “We can focus on our core business, which, for us, is video streaming.

Initially performing a lift-and-shift cloud migration to AWS, Vimond was able to launch Vimond VIA, its first cloud-based video and content management solution. From there, the company has shifted toward rearchitecting its backend to support three flexible, cloud-based deployment options: multi-tenant software-as-a-service deployments; dedicated AWS account deployments; and customer-environment deployments.

To free its engineers from provisioning virtual machines, Vimond containerized its workloads on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), helping it build, run, and scale production-ready Kubernetes applications across any environment. Vimond then paired Amazon EKS with Karpenter, which provides dynamic auto-scaling for its clusters.

By combining these solutions, Vimond’s customers no longer have to submit support tickets to overprovision their compute resources ahead of live events. “By building on AWS, we can actually scale up and down without having to rely on our operations team to do it,” says Børre Andre Sandvik, executive vice president product and technology at Vimond. “It happens on its own, which also helps us optimize our infrastructure costs and stay competitive with other streaming solutions on the market.”

Vimond also modernized its video ingestion and transcoding by adopting AWS Elemental, a comprehensive portfolio of media services, software, and appliances for processing, monetizing, and delivering the highest quality video at global scale. The platform’s monetization capabilities are handled through Vimond VIA’s dedicated monetization model; using this solution, customers can implement various revenue models for their content. Video content is then securely stored in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), an easy-to-manage relational database service optimized for total cost of ownership.

While rebuilding its platform, Vimond collaborated closely with the AWS team. “Having access to a set of subject matter experts from AWS has made our lives easier,” says Luzzi. “Instead of spending weeks or even months looking for the best solutions, we can pull in an AWS specialist to help us align our platform with best practices.

Vimond rebuilt its platform using more than 60 AWS services, helping Vimond and their customers save 35 percent or more on infrastructure spend. Moreover, the company can deliver a stable platform experience for large-scale streams and live events with 99.999 percent availability.

Vimond’s cloud transformation also supports continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). In turn, Vimond’s teams have focused on creating new content management features, such as generative artificial intelligence–assisted captioning and support for more than 30 languages.

Using its multi-tenant, cloud-native framework, Vimond launched Vimond Essentials. Vimond Essentials is an all-in-one platform that empowers its customers to build and launch streaming apps for the web, iOS, Android devices, and Apple and Android TV in as little as 15 minutes.

Vimond, an AWS Partner, now offers Vimond Essentials in the AWS Marketplace, a one-stop-shop for discovering, deploying, and managing solutions for the cloud. “We can reduce our customers’ operational overhead and increase their margins,” says Sandvik. “More importantly, we can deliver a resilient, scalable service on AWS so that audiences around the world can enjoy uninterrupted streams and the best quality of video from any device, anytime.