Antenna Entertainment partners with Cheppers and Insys VT to migrate their websites to AWS

Introduction

Antenna Entertainment, a private international technology, media, and entertainment company operating on the European market, has recently acquired Sony Pictures Entertainment’s CEE portfolio, which contains more than 15 TV channels and related assets (like AXN, Viasat Family).

Cheppers has been about creating something awesome since 2012—whether it’s building websites that perfectly balance aesthetics and functionality or highly available cloud-based services at scale. We strive to understand our clients, and build real, longer lasting partnerships with our team.
Cheppers is known as a very technical shop numbering over 70 full-time employees working with more than 25 different technologies.

To share the content with its viewers, the company decided to take over the TV channels’ online presence and migrate the video on demand (VOD) streaming platforms to AWS.

In March 2022, they partnered with a Drupal and AWS expert company, Cheppers, to take over the operations and development and to migrate the websites from its previous hosting infrastructure to AWS. Taking advantage of Cheppers’ AWS Advanced Consulting Partnership with AWS, we involved Insys Video Technologies to deploy their VOD solution to serve video content on the migrated websites. Cheppers was also responsible for implementing the new video playback platform into the Drupal websites. Frontside was responsible for the project management.

Insys is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Tier Services Partners with proven customer experience and a strong team of trained and certified technical individuals. The collaboration resulted in a successful platform launch in several countries, including Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Bulgaria.

'Combining the expertise and skills of Cheppers, Insys Video Technologies and Frontside resulted in a product that answers all of our needs,' says Szabolcs Vértesi, Head of IT at Antenna Entertainment. 'Insys provided a high-quality embedded video player that supports in-content advertisements and a CMS panel. Meanwhile, Cheppers focused on AWS migration and our Drupal websites - they migrated them on AWS, upgraded and stabilised Drupal and migrated the video player.'

Initial project status

The websites were hosted on-premises on a static clustered environment consisting of three web servers, a MySQL database and a network file system providing access to static assets to each web server. The VOD solution was based on a third-party SaaS solution.

Key challenges

• Sheer amount of data to be migrated - being a media company, they host several terabytes of static assets which are available through their websites.
• No operational metrics available, making it difficult to predict the required resources.
• Aging web stack - Drupal’s monolithic nature makes it challenging to scale in a cloud environment.
• The websites were integrated with several deprecated and internal systems. These components were needed to be audited, removed or rewritten.
• Continuous operation and development required us to build a CI/CD pipeline for the project.

Implementation highlights

Cheppers delivered a highly available, fault tolerant, auto-scaling cloud infrastructure to host the websites with high performance and optimized costs.

Results

• Optimised infrastructure and decreased VCMS costs by 30-40% depending on traffic
• Improved service monitoring
• Significantly reduced response time by infrastructure and Drupal optimizations

Technologies used

• AWS: Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, Auto Scaling, Load Balancing, RDS Aurora, ElastiCache, Elastic File System, S3, CloudFront, CloudWatch, WAF v2
• PHP, Drupal
• GitLab CI/CD
• Terraform
• nginx, php-fpm