Entertainment Portal in the EU: Reduced Infrastructure Expenses and Significantly Increased Reliability
Project Description
The client operates an entertainment portal with a core audience in Europe. The main challenges they faced were related to a significant increase in technical support costs, an increase in the number of critical software failures, and a nonlinear growth in infrastructure maintenance costs as the number of visitors increased. The client also recognized the risks of being unable to fully recover functionality after a severe infrastructure failure. An important requirement from the client was the project's completion time due to plans to attract a large volume of new audience.
Client's Main Requests:
  • Conduct a comprehensive audit of the infrastructure and code together with the client's developers.
  • Develop and implement a plan to reduce expenses and increase infrastructure reliability.
  • Migrate key parts of the infrastructure to Ansible and Terraform.
  • Complete all work within 1 month from the contract signing.
Key Metrics
  • 1+ million visitors per day
  • 4-5x reduction in the cost of servicing each client
  • 37% reduction in the number of technical support tickets
  • 3 weeks from the start of the project to its successful completion
  • 94.3% availability level before refactoring, which negatively impacted the client's business
Key Challenges and Results
We conducted a comprehensive audit, examining the features of the CMS and software used by the client. Based on the audit results, we made the following decisions:
  • Discontinue the use of a global CDN in favor of our own servers with redundancy within the EU. This allowed for a 4-5 fold reduction in user service costs.
  • Update and optimize software settings. As a result, we achieved a significant increase in portal responsiveness and a reduction in the number of errors.
  • Transition from manual software configuration to the infrastructure-as-code concept.
  • Move data backups from the cloud to our own servers while adhering to georedundancy standards, significantly reducing costs.
Given the critical deadlines for the client, we allocated a separate group of DevOps engineers who exclusively worked on this project with the highest priority. The proposed solutions allowed for a 4-5 fold reduction in costs, and the conducted audit helped us identify several critical errors in software configuration. As a result, we increased the availability level from 94.3% to 99.2%, meeting the client's requests. The average number of tickets to the client's internal technical support decreased by 37%. Thanks to the dedicated team of engineers, we managed to complete the project in just 3 working weeks, allowing the client to timely implement plans for audience growth.
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