Case Study on AWS: Hungama Digital Media Entertainment

Hungama Digital Media Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. This digital media company, based in Mumbai, India.  The company was first launched in 1999 by Ashish Kacholia, Hiren Ved, Lashit Sanghvi, Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and Neeraj Roy as an online promotions agency.

Now it is a leading aggregator, developer, publisher and distributor of Bollywood and South-Asian entertainment content. It has partnerships with over 400 content creators, record labels, studios, broadcasters, and game publishers, and has licensed, worldwide exclusive digital rights to more than one-half million music and video titles.

It delivers content to consumers in 47 countries across mobile, Internet, and Internet protocol television (IPTV) services, and has more than 150 partners across the world.  It won Gold Award for Best Digital Communications Campaign from the Promotion Marketing Awards of Asia (2009).

What are the main challenges that company faced earlier

Before migrating to AWS, the company ran its servers in local data centers. This solution soon became expensive, time-consuming, and inefficient. Hungama wanted to turn projects around quickly but old equipment caused delays in implementation and service launches.

After joined AWS

In 2008, Hungama migrated to AWS to take advantage of the cost effectiveness, flexibility, and fast time-to-market offered by the cloud.

The cost savings allowed Hungama to focus its engineering resources on getting products and services to market more quickly. The company began to grow rapidly, but as more internal teams started using AWS, its monthly costs also grew. Hungama’s infrastructure team engaged AWS Support to help them find ways to optimize costs.

“Our migration to AWS in 2008 reduced IT costs considerably,”

Amit Vora

CTO for Hungama

AWS Services Used by Hungama Digital Media Entertainment Pvt. Ltd.

• Amazon EC2

• Amazon S3

• Amazon RDS

• Amazon EBS

• AWS Support

The company uses Amazon Simple Storage Services(Amazon S3) to host more than 60 TB of content. For server and storage management, Hungama uses Amazon Elastic Compute cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) with Amazon S3.

The flexibility of the AWS solution enables the Bollywood moviemaker to develop applications on multiple platforms and programming models including Java, PHP, .NET, Oracle, MySQL, and SQL technologies.

Hungama Architecture Diagram

Hungama used the Underutilized EBS Volumes check to review utilization history for Amazon EBS volumes. The check identified a number of unused or underutilized EBS volumes that were often leftover from previous test projects. The check also highlighted volumes that Hungama was paying for but not accessing regularly. As a result, the audit team created snapshots, which they stored on Amazon S3, and then deleted the volumes. This action also resulted in a reduction of over 90% on the number of snapshots generated weekly.

Benefits after using AWS

According to Hungama, the flexibility of the pay-as-you go model and cost savings resulting from cloud computing is a crucial competitive advantage because it allows the company to focus on innovation and time-to-market. By implementing the results of the AWS Trusted Advisor audit,

Amit Vora says,

“We estimate an average 33 percent monthly savings on our total AWS spend from Q4 2012 to Q1 2013. We will continue leveraging the features and checks of the AWS Trusted Advisor to keep optimizing our infrastructure and costs on AWS.”

Working with the AWS TAM, it took Hungama’s technical team less than 4 weeks from the initial report presentation, review, and implementation, to complete the optimization. The audit team reviewed updated Trusted Advisor reports extensively to determine if the optimization work was having the desired impact.

 “Using AWS enables us to accelerate our innovation process and speed-to-market in rolling out our services worldwide. The flexibility to scale both up and down, and not sit on unneeded, excess capacity at any time has really enabled us to cater to the sudden spurts in business in a timely fashion.”

Amit Vora

CTO, Hungama

Hungama plans to continue to work with AWS Support to implement AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations for hardening, extending fault tolerance and improving performance of its environment.

THANK YOU.