WHAT IS CLOUD COMPUTING AND AWS(PUBLIC CLOUD) CASE STUDY OF ABP NEWS NETWORK

What is cloud computing, in simple terms?

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

How does cloud computing work?

Rather than owning their own computing infrastructure or data centers, companies can rent access to anything from applications to storage from a cloud service provider.

One benefit of using cloud computing services is that firms can avoid the upfront cost and complexity of owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure, and instead simply pay for what they use, when they use it.

In turn, providers of cloud computing services can benefit from significant economies of scale by delivering the same services to a wide range of customers.

What cloud computing services are available?

Cloud computing services cover a vast range of options now, from the basics of storage, networking, and processing power through to natural language processing and artificial intelligence as well as standard office applications. Pretty much any service that doesn't require you to be physically close to the computer hardware that you are using can now be delivered via the cloud.

How important is the cloud?

Building the infrastructure to support cloud computing now accounts for more than a third of all IT spending worldwide, according to research from IDC. Meanwhile spending on traditional, in-house IT continues to slide as computing workloads continue to move to the cloud, whether that is public cloud services offered by vendors or private clouds built by enterprises themselves.

451 Research predicts that around one-third of enterprise IT spending will be on hosting and cloud services this year "indicating a growing reliance on external sources of infrastructure, application, management and security services". Analyst Gartner predicts that half of global enterprises using the cloud now will have gone all-in- on it by 2021.

According to Gartner, global spending on cloud services will reach $260bn this year up from $219.6bn. It's also growing at a faster rate than the analysts expected. But it's not entirely clear how much of that demand is coming from businesses that actually want to move to the cloud and how much is being created by vendors who now only offer cloud versions of their products (often because they are keen to move to away from selling one-off licences to selling potentially more lucrative and predictable cloud subscriptions).

Types of Cloud Computing:

Based on a cloud location, we can classify cloud as:

• Public Cloud – Whole computing infrastructure is located on the premises of a cloud computing company that offers the cloud service.
• Private Cloud – Hosting all your computing infrastructure yourself and is not shared. The security and control level is highest while using a private network.
• Hybrid Cloud – using both private and public clouds, depending on their purpose. You host your most important applications on your own servers to keep them more secure and secondary applications elsewhere.
• Community Cloud – A community cloud is shared between organizations with a common goal or that fit into a specific community (professional community, geographic community, etc.).

Advantages of Cloud Computing:

Here is a list of some of the most important advantages that Cloud Computing has to offer ?

• Cost-Efficient ? Building our own servers and tools is time-consuming as well as expensive as we need to order, pay for, install, and configure expensive hardware, long before we need it. However, using cloud computing, we only pay for the amount we use and when we use the computing resources. In this manner, cloud computing is cost efficient.
• Reliability ? A cloud computing platform provides much more managed, reliable and consistent service than an in-house IT infrastructure. It guarantees 24x7 and 365 days of service. If any of the server fails, then hosted applications and services can easily be transited to any of the available servers.
• Unlimited Storage ? Cloud computing provides almost unlimited storage capacity, i.e., we need not worry about running out of storage space or increasing our current storage space availability. We can access as much or as little as we need.
• Backup & Recovery ? Storing data in the cloud, backing it up and restoring the same is relatively easier than storing it on a physical device. The cloud service providers also have enough technology to recover our data, so there is the convenience of recovering our data anytime.
• Easy Access to Information ? Once you register yourself in cloud, you can access your account from anywhere in the world provided there is internet connection at that point. There are various storage and security facilities that vary with the account type chosen.

Why AWS is famous in all the cloud?

AWS provide nearly 2500+ services for their clients, this is one of the big reason that most of the companies adopting AWS as a public cloud inspite of Azure, GCP, Alibaba etc...

There are the many customers of AWS named as ABP NEWS, NETFLIX, MPL GAMING, PHILIPS, SLACK, OLX and many more.

Case Study:

I world like to discuss case study of ABP News Network:

ABP News Network Increases Page Views by 70% Using AWS

ABP News Network (ANN)—one of the largest TV networks in India—operates five news channels in Indian languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi, and Gujarati, and reaches out to more than 150 million TV audiences per week.

Like most media businesses worldwide, ANN has been disrupted by new technologies and rising consumer demand for immediate and ubiquitous access to content. Unlike some industry participants, however, the Noida-headquartered business has seized the opportunities presented by the digital age. Its online news website—www.ABPLive.in—and app—ABP Live—caters to more than 40 million monthly visitors.

The Challenge which is faced by ANN:

News in India can occur in a more dynamic, volatile, and unpredictable way compared to other international markets. This means spikes in traffic to digital and mobile news services can occur at any time of the day with minimal warning. A major breaking news story can increase traffic by three times, rising to six times for elections that may occur as often as once a year.

It was therefore extremely important for ANN to scale the technology infrastructure quickly to support these traffic spikes. Furthermore, similarly to international consumers, Indian audiences were increasingly consuming news through digital and mobile services, as well as through broadcast and print. Videos uploaded online were increasingly complementing broadcast and text-based news services. In 2013, ANN predicted extending its digital presence from a single website to a range of services could increase its page views from 150 million to over 500 million. The business had to sustain this growth cost-effectively while delivering the responsiveness and reliability that digital consumers demanded. “Considering all the factors in play, we wanted a robust, cost-optimized infrastructure that was reliable and highly scalable,” says Retesh Gondal, head of digital technology at ANN.

Unfortunately, ANN’ existing managed service provider technology infrastructure could not meet these challenges. The business’s agreement with this provider made scaling its website at short notice to support traffic spikes difficult and expensive. Furthermore, ANN could not gain the visibility to control and optimize its use of infrastructure resources.

The business also risked ceding competitive advantage to rival media companies by delivering new websites, mobile services, and other products to market in months rather than weeks. The limitations of the infrastructure meant editors would be forced to take up to seven minutes to upload a news video several times longer than a media business operating in a highly competitive marketplace could tolerate.

Ultimately, ANN risked not being able to deliver news quickly to meet viewer demands for immediacy and secure a strong position in the competitive digital news market in India. Furthermore, the business could not position itself to enter new geographic markets seamlessly and cost-effectively.

Why Amazon Web Services?

ANN brought its web infrastructure back into an on-premises data center as an intermediate step toward moving to a public cloud. To prepare for that move, the company started conducting due diligence on leading public cloud services with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

ANN’s business and technology leaders were acutely aware that selecting the right cloud provider was critical to the future of the business. Despite ceding first-mover advantage in digital news to rival media companies, ANN was keen to secure market leadership among key readership demographics by providing compelling news content over a range of digital and mobile channels.

This required working with a cloud provider that could scale quickly to support traffic spikes and longer-term growth in traffic to web, mobile, and video news services. In 2014, the company decided to migrate its infrastructure, applications, and services to AWS.

“We selected AWS because of the flexibility to align our infrastructure costs and consumption with demand, and the ease and simplicity with which we could move to the AWS Cloud,” says Gondal. “AWS also specializes in infrastructure services that enable businesses like ours to distribute video content and mobile applications to users’ smartphones, tablets, and personal computers.”

ANN completed its initial migration to AWS in only four months and has continued to expand the services running in the public cloud architecture to include additional websites, mobile applications, and a video content management system. “We evaluated all the video content management service providers in our market but determined the best option was to develop a system in-house and use workflow, storage, and video file conversion tools provided by AWS,” says Gondal. ANN uses Amazon Simple Storage Service(Amazon S3) to store video files and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(Amazon EC2) to run the system used to manage the video content. Amazon Elastic Transcoder converts ANN’ video files from source to different formats for viewing on a range of devices.

The business also opted to develop a video analytics system in-house. “We tested the market and either the costs of the solutions were too high, or they could not deliver the type of data we wanted to collate,” says Gondal. “We elected to deploy our own solution to analyze video usage and service quality using data streaming, collection, loading, warehousing, and processing tools provided by AWS.” ANN is using Amazon kinesis to load streaming data into an Amazon S3 bucket and an Amazon Redshift data warehouse, with Amazon EMR used to complete data processing activities.

Key to ANN’ success is its choice of AWS services to run its mobile applications. According to a Morgan Stanley report quoted in the Economic Times, India is expected to overtake the United States as the world’s second-largest smartphone market in 2017. According to the publication, the researchers estimate the Indian market will grow by a compound annual growth rate of 23 percent through 2018, and account for 30 percent of global growth during the period. This trend is creating a huge market for mobile applications to deliver a range of content, including news, features, and analysis. ANN elected to use AWS Lambda to deliver an architecture that seamlessly updates content feeds served from Amazon S3 to mobile users without requiring the management and maintenance of a single server.

The Benefits of Using AWS:

“Breaking news in India can result in a dramatic surge in traffic. We implemented a first of its kind serverless architecture deployed over Amazon S3 which helps us manage traffic to an unlimited number," says Gondal.

• Cuts video uploading times from seven minutes to less than one minute
• Supported growth from 150 million to 500 million page views
• Scaled to support traffic spikes of up to six times during peak periods
• The company is running its services including websites, mobile apps, and a video content management system on AWS.

Thanks For Reading!!!