European media giant taps OpenStack-AWS hybrid cloud to accelerate time to market

Challenges

ProSiebenSat.1 Group is the parent company to more than 20 business units and subsidiaries formed over many years and locations. Regional stations such as Sat.1, Kabel Eins, and Sixx report to the primary ProSiebenSat.1 TV business while content production, ad sales, and e-commerce reside in federated divisions. This decentralized structure has allowed teams across the company to drive innovation and growth.

While each business has a tailored approach to software development and platforms, all face similar IT challenges. Fast-paced markets require rapid and creative content development, and competitive forces yield cost and data protection pressure.

Faster Time-to Market and Lower Risk

Provisioning of new servers often took days and hindered business agility. To speed time-to-market, some teams turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, not all production applications were best suited for the public cloud deployments.

Other divisions migrated to VMware-based virtualized server environments, and a few maintained bare metal and legacy compute environments. Emerging development teams leveraged LAMP stacks, node.js, and MongoDB. But with this varied approach, not all teams had adopted the latest IT best practices such as continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) and breaking IT silos.

More recently, data protection risks caught the attention of ProSiebenSat.1 business leaders, most notably those using public cloud services. The company embraced strong data protection policies, but reliance on U.S. cloud providers brought security concerns.

With sponsorship of a few ProSiebenSat.1 engineering groups, the central IT team within the Global CIO office set out to explore state-of-the-art, unified software development and IT infrastructure. The team sought a single platform that could meet all business units’ needs – availability, cost, security, and time-to-market.

Other entertainment, online commerce, and gaming companies had recently adopted OpenStack open source private clouds, which made this platform a practical place to start the search. Furthermore, OpenStack could offer flexible and automated Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to enable the company’s emerging DevOps culture.

The new platform, however, had to support a direct connection with AWS for bi-directional workload migration based on an application’s availability, cost, scale, or security needs. Other requirements included usage visibility and billing charge backs, as well as performance and uptime transparency. Lastly, the global IT team wanted a truly open platform they could constantly improve.

“Our goal is to design a platform that will be used throughout the business, that incorporates all the latest IT best practices,”says Bosc.

Solution

Within the centralized platform search, the ProSiebenSat.1 global IT team wanted to validate an existing workload and believed a cloud-ready web application would be a good choice. Furthermore, validating an application running on AWS that showed improved flexibility, cost, and security would help reach their goals.

The first step of the Central Technology Initiative, however, was to design and test a platform architecture in a high availability environment where a server failure would have no impact on uptime. This required an integration with ProSiebenSat.1’s existing load balancing solution.

OpenStack Platform and Mirantis Services

Global IT evaluated the OpenStack cloud platform and quickly found it met the company’s needs. Developers could access resources through APIs without talking to IT, whichwould reduce provisioning times from days to minutes. Operations teams could allocate resources but still maintain control through quotas and identity services. And both teamshad visibility of available and used resources through portals and dashboards.

ProSiebenSat.1’s global IT team also contacted Canonical but found the company to be less responsive than Mirantis and have fewer resources. Furthermore, Canonical did not have a similar consultative service.

Use Case Validation

Impressed with the validation service, ProSiebenSat.1 contracted Mirantis, and the project was launched. Quickly, a plan was defined, and a program manager assigned deployment resources. The project leveraged the Mirantis reference architecture and Fuel software, an OpenStack project pioneered by Mirantis, which rapidly deploys and manages cloud components.

After detailed requirements discussions, Mirantis and ProSiebenSat.1 decided to deploy several nodes with Swift object storage, Neutron networking, and Ubuntu and KVM on the compute nodes. The architecture also included MongoDB, Ceilometer for metering/monitoring, and Sahara for analytics.

After a few modifications to the OpenStack platform deployed in ProSieben.Sat1’s Frankfurt datacenter, the application met all validation criteria and the project was complete.

Results

ProSieben.Sat1’s platform validation confirmed the IT team’s assumption that an OpenStack private cloud would benefit the three key stakeholders – IT operations, software developers, and business leaders.

For IT operations, a centralized private cloud would allow the global and divisional IT teams to focus on new developer tools and cloud features, not on tickets and provisioning. Automated infrastructure management could now be distributed to developers, which saves time and resources across many groups.