Accelerating Agility: Media Conglomerate’s Journey to Efficiency on Google Cloud

Business Opportunity

Migrating for Modernization and Optimization

The client is a media production house that runs multiple applications, including Asia’s #1 financial media app for business and finance-related news. The app offers real-time stock quotes from BSE and NSE, tracks the Sensex and Nifty indices, and provides extensive coverage of both Indian and global markets. Users can manage their investment portfolios and access live broadcasts of multiple financial media channels as well. Given the dynamic nature of financial markets, it was essential for the client to maintain agility and flexibility in its applications.  

Partnering with Niveus, the media house transformed its infrastructure by modernizing and migrating applications to GCP, optimizing 422 VMs, and ensuring the system could handle 11,000 concurrent requests per second. This comprehensive effort enhanced agility, reduced costs, and prepared the client for future technology integration.

The Challenge

The client faced significant technical challenges with their critical applications, which were hosted on virtual machines in their on-premises data center. These challenges included:

• High Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The on-premises data center setup resulted in longer recovery times during outages or maintenance, impacting the app’s reliability. 
• Extended Deployment Timelines: Deploying updates and new features took longer, delaying the app’s ability to respond to market changes and user needs swiftly.
• Limited DevOps Maturity: The existing infrastructure did not support advanced DevOps practices, limiting the efficiency and speed of development and deployment processes.
• Near Zero Downtime: we reduced the downtime significantly bringing it to near-zero.

To address the challenges, Niveus proposed an ambitious migration project, moving the client’s various critical applications to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The goal was to achieve greater agility, faster turnaround times, and cost savings on infrastructure. However, our approach went beyond a simple ‘lift-and-shift’ migration. We implemented a comprehensive modernization of the application, ensuring it was future-ready and optimized to thrive on the new environment.

Our Solution

By partnering with Niveus, the media conglomerate successfully transformed its application infrastructures, migrating to GCP with a focus on modernization and optimization. The migration covered the length and depth of the client’s operations, migrating multiple mission-critical applications while ensuring a root-level transformation. 

The overarching objective was to enhance agility, expedite turnaround times, and drive cost savings across their extensive infrastructure. However, our strategy transcended a mere ‘lift-and-shift’ approach, executing a comprehensive modernization effort, ensuring readiness for future technology integration and optimization for the new environment. The work included migrating and modernizing their applications – making them capable of handling 11,000 concurrent requests per second – transferring 28TB of data, and optimizing 422 VMs for enhanced performance.

We established an Enterprise Landing Zone on GCP to streamline and expedite the migration process. By containerizing applications and migrating from VMs to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), we leveraged advanced DevOps practices for enhanced performance and management. Implementing a CI/CD pipeline with Git, Jenkins, and ArgoCD automated the deployment cycle, increasing speed and reliability while the GitOps model ensured continuous delivery and integration. We created a containerization accelerator that enabled the client team to deploy their workloads faster. Infrastructure optimization and automation included security checks and validations for a robust, secure setup. Advanced monitoring tools and SRE practices, along with Google-managed certificates, provided better oversight, management, and secure communications.

Benefits of Moving to GCP with Niveus

The migration comprehensively covered various applications under the client, ensuring each is now well-suited for innovation on the cloud. Here are some of the benefits the media house now enjoys: 

• Improved Availability and Reduced Operational Expenses: Migration to GKE increased application availability and significantly lowered operational costs.
• Enhanced Scalability and Reduced Downtime: Downtime was minimized, and scalability was drastically improved, enabling the applications to serve larger audiences efficiently.
• Streamlined and Controlled Deployments: Modernized CI/CD pipelines ensured higher deployment quality and control, leading to more reliable releases.
• Consolidation of Applications: Consolidating applications from multiple on-premise sites into GCP-optimized skill sets for managing the client’s infrastructure.
• Enhanced Security Controls and Modernization: Updated security measures and modernized application infrastructure on the cloud ensured a more secure environment.
• Transition to Cloud-Native Solutions: Adoption of cloud-native solutions facilitated a more agile approach to application management.

Results

The migration to GCP had a profound impact on the client’s operations. We successfully modernized all applications, ensuring they were optimized for the cloud environment. We used pipelines to automate the build (source code to jar file, etc.), though deployment was kept manual. The migration to GCP and the adoption of DevOps practices significantly reduced deployment timelines, enabling the client to quickly respond to market changes. We helped to optimize infrastructure and automate processes leading to significant cost savings on infrastructure and operations. The integration of CI/CD pipelines and GitOps practices enhanced development cycles, leading to more efficient and reliable releases. Better monitoring and management tools helped to ensure the high availability and performance of the applications. This comprehensive modernization enabled the client to deliver a seamless and reliable user experience on a much larger scale.

• The infrastructure now supports approximately 11,000 concurrent user requests per second, demonstrating its robust capacity to handle high traffic. 
• Notably, 75% of instances were containerized, contributing to a more agile and efficient system. The transition involved transferring around 28TB of data, highlighting the scale and complexity of the project. 
• Additionally, 422 virtual machines were migrated and optimized, significantly enhancing performance and efficiency. 
• We achieved zero downtime during the migration, a marked improvement from the previous 2-hour window.

Power of Partnership

Partnering with Niveus was instrumental in accelerating the client’s migration from an on-premises setup to GCP. Our expertise and collaborative approach ensured a seamless transition, enabling the client to rapidly overcome technical challenges and realize benefits quickly. With our guidance, the client leveraged advanced DevOps practices, automated processes, and optimized their infrastructure, significantly speeding up deployment cycles and improving operational efficiency. This partnership allowed the client’s team to focus on their core business while we handled the technical complexities, ensuring a smooth and swift migration.