July Systems is a leading mobile media company that delivers mobile internet publishing, distribution, & monetization for major brands such as MTV Networks and CBS Sports. July’s Mi™ Channel appeals to media, sports, business, and entertainment companies as a cost effective, scalable, feature-rich mobile platform.
One of Mi™ Channel’s prominent features is LiveCenter, specifically targeted toward media companies that cover live events, including breaking news, sports, and stock markets, and need to offer their consumers real-time mobile updates.
In order to support their large clients and deliver real-time content, July’s data center costs spiked exponentially and managing the hardware infrastructure quickly became a regular, costly challenge. “July needed a new solution and looked at cloud computing as a possibility. The team did some research and AWS was at the top of the list of options,” says Karthik Pattabhiraman, Director, Operations and Business Automation, July Systems.“We migrated to AWS and now all our systems run on Amazon EC2. Deploying July services on AWS was easy – currently, we have 100 instances of 32 and 64 bit virtual machines that run all our applications and MySQL database. We also use Amazon S3 for storage and backup.”
The ability for July Systems to meet the demands of their major-brand clients was only part of the appeal to move to AWS. As a managed service offering, July’s key value proposition is being cost effective and AWS allows them to reduce costs and efficiently manage their growth.
“AWS has impressive load handling capabilities. For example, it handles steep traffic spikes for weekend sports on July-powered portals, that are up to 20x that of weekdays. It has greatly helped us handle such periodic and major surges in load,” says Pattabhiraman. “Specifically, AWS helped us handle the 2008-2009 NFL season and supported the dynamic requirements of LiveCenter.”
“The speed and ease of deploying new instances has been amazing. Speed is crucial to the nature of our business since July Systems powers major brand name portals on mobile,” recalls Pattabhiraman.
At this time, July powers leading brands such as CBS Sports, MTV Networks, Fox Entertainment Group, Lifetime, IndyCar, Turner, NASCAR and NBA, as well as leading media houses in India like NDTV, Network 18, and HT Media. July Systems continues to roll out new customers and look at ways to leverage additional AWS services like Amazon SimpleDB, to enhance their performance and improve their cost efficiency.
Amazon Case Study: July Systems
Date: 28-08-2013
