Olympusat Case Study

Olympusat is a large, independent media company specializing in ownership, corporate distribution, production, and technical services. The company has established itself as a leader in the Hispanic television and media space with more than 100 English-language and Spanish-language television networks. The company provides an over-the-top content-delivery offering called VEMOX, which enables Olympusat to distribute live channels and extensive on-demand video to smart televisions and other smart devices via the cloud. Olympusat was founded in 1999 and engages more than eight million viewers each day.

• Olympusat was running a traditional PHP application, but wanted to use one language to run its backend.
• The company’s server-based architecture required a server administrator to handle upgrades and launch new instances.
• The company wanted to move to a microservices architecture to support both a layer of primitive functions to perform common tasks, as well as another layer of application services such as video-format translation.
  

• Olympusat realized it could develop application services more quickly by switching from a PHP application to a NodeJS implementation using Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda.
• The company built a microservices architecture by creating a low-level set of primitive microservices running in an asynchronous workflow, which let the company add new delivery vehicles and data sources without adding code.
• Amazon API Gateway fronts an asynchronous workflow layer that is implemented using AWS Lambda, which validates incoming requests against a schema stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
• Once validated, the message is put in a queue in Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) and is added to Amazon DynamoDB.
• The workflow function uses Amazon Simple Notification Service to communicate with the microservices, signaling to either call more services or return results.
  

• Olympusat saves about $25,000 monthly by eliminating the use of similar, more expensive services.
• Using one backend language managed by AWS Lambda, the company can put code into production without the need to provision infrastructure or disrupt other departments.
• AWS Lambda eliminated the need for server administration, so more time is spent focusing on innovation and problem-solving rather than managing servers.