The software solution was provided for the US-based Software Innovation Labs. The client who the solution was developed for - CollegeHumorMedia - is an online entertainment company which delivers comedic content, including videos, pictures, articles and jokes to younger audiences. The latter demographics are in turn attractive targets for online advertisers who can conveniently reach them on the platform.

The client had previously developed a video content platform - an internet TV site - for the distribution of client’s video contents along with thedropout.tv application - a functionally independent paid service with premium contents. What was needed was a devops infrastructure for supporting the latter service application. More specifically, the challenge consisted in designing and implementing the architecture of the solution which would be based on AWS services. More broadly, the goal was to create an automation strategy which would allow to provision the new environment within hours, i.e., achieve a significant reduction in the time-to-market. All in all, AWS -based infrastructure coupled with Ansible scripts were to ensure fast and efficient automatic provisioning and deployment of the video service application.

To meet the client’s challenge, our team designed and implemented an AWS-based devops infrastructure environment dedicated to running the client’s premium video content streaming service. We also developed an automation strategy which allowed the client to provision the new application environment in a fast and efficient way. To implement the latter solution, we programmed a set of scripts which enabled to automate the process of application deployment in the AWS environment as well as the process of AWS infrastructure provisioning. The automation implemented made the application maintenance much more efficient and cost effective as well as substantially shortened the time-to-market thus meeting the client’s key requirements and project objectives.

In terms of technology, while building the software we used Ansible as a tool for creating scripts meant to ensure provisioning automation in the infrastructure. The solution was based on a few AWS services such as AWS EC2 for servers management, AWS ECS with the Docker containers runtime environment for faster application deployment and scaling out (meant to accommodate growing traffic loads), AWS ECR - a Docker container registry for storing applications - and AWS Route 53 - a highly available / reliable DNS manager.

To sum up, the AWS-based devops infrastructure built, the Ansible-based deployment automation as well as the Jenkins-based CI/CD pipeline ensure fast and efficient infrastructure provisioning and automatic application deployment, which enable a significant reduction in time-to-market, i.e., - among other things - changes in the application can be immediately deployed to production.