"With traditional IT, it would take weeks or months to contend with hardware lead times to add more capacity. Using AWS, we can look at user metrics weekly or daily and react with new capacity in 30 seconds." Richard Crowley Director of Operations
AWS Case Study: Slack
About Slack
Slack provides a messaging platform that integrates with and unifies a wide range of communications services such as Twitter, Dropbox, Google Docs, Jira, GitHub, MailChimp, Trello, and Stripe. The San Francisco–based company, which launched its eponymous app in February 2014, was started by a small group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that include Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield. Privately-held Slack is on Fortune Magazine’s “Unicorn List” of startup firms worth $1 billion or more, with a $2.8 billion valuation supported by a five percent weekly user growth rate and major brand-name customers including Adobe, Samsung, Intuit, NASA, Dow Jones, eBay, and Expedia.
The Challenge
In the age of the unicorn startups, Slack has drawn attention for its meteoric rise and potential for disrupting traditional business communications tools, particularly email. By June 2015—less than 18 months after its launch—the company already had more than 1.1 million daily users, 300,000 paid seats, and more than 30 million messages flowing through Slack each week via integrations with other services.
Slack’s founders had already learned hard lessons from previous failed ventures. One of those was the importance of picking the right IT infrastructure to run the business. If Slack was to succeed in a fiercely competitive business-software marketplace, its founders knew they would need a lean staff, low costs, and above all an IT environment capable of supporting speed, agility, and innovation. Going to the cloud was the logical choice.
“The realities of physical space, hardware acquisition, replacement parts, running a server facility with all its costs—all the physical manifestations that can lead to breakages—made a traditional IT environment impractical for an Internet startup,” says Richard Crowley, Slack’s director of operations. “Plus we would have needed an extra layer of expertise just to run the infrastructure. We could have operated with that kind of IT infrastructure, but the cost and complexity would have made it much harder to launch the business.”
Why Amazon Web Services
Crowley says Slack turned to Amazon Web Services out of experience and because it was the best choice for the company going forward. Tiny Speck—the original company name for what became Slack Technologies—used AWS in 2009 when it was the only viable offering for public cloud services.
“Given their expertise and pains running a more traditional environment when Flickr was developed, Slack’s founders realized it was a no brainer to use AWS,” says Crowley. “During the development of Slack, the feeling was that AWS was good to us and would continually improve with more and better features. There was no need to leave.”
Slack has a relatively simple IT architecture that is based on a broad range of AWS services, including i2.xlarge Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for basic compute tasks; Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for users’ file uploads and static assets; and Elastic Load Balancing to balance workloads across Amazon EC2 instances.
For security, Slack uses Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to control security groups and firewall rules and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control user credentials and roles. The company uses Amazon CloudTrail for monitoring logs related to Amazon EC2 instances, and Amazon Route 53 for DNS management.
Along with the AWS services, Slack is using the Redis data structure server, the Apache Solr search tool, the Squid caching proxy, and a MySQL database.
The Benefits
Using AWS as its IT infrastructure has helped Slack achieve an astonishing growth rate and a multibillion-dollar valuation with a platform that supports speed of innovation and responsiveness, reliability, and security features to ensure the confidentiality of customer information.
Crowley says AWS gives fast-growing companies like Slack the ability to minimize their involvement with daily IT management. That lets them focus on pushing innovative products and services to market quickly. “We have a lot of metrics and programs that tell us about available capacity for new customer teams to join and existing customers to grow their Slack usage,” he says. “With traditional IT, it would take weeks or months to contend with hardware lead times to add more capacity. Using AWS, we can look at user metrics weekly or daily and react with new capacity in 30 seconds.”
The ease of provisioning resources in the AWS cloud allows Slack to practice disaster recovery scenarios, which is essential for assuring existing and prospective customers that their information will always be there, when and where they need it. “One of the real strengths of AWS is that we can do a lot of re-provisioning of our infrastructure, making sure that we can recover quickly and competently in the event that something goes down,” Crowley says. “Having the ability to quickly grab twice as many of a certain class of instances is great. It gives us the ability to regularly practice our disaster recovery scenarios.”
A large part of the appeal of Slack is that it replaces disparate communications tools with a single, unified platform. But that puts an increased burden on Slack to ensure that its customers' information is safe, and that Slack can deliver the kind of enterprise reliability and high availability to support the service-level agreements expected of robust enterprise applications.
“As a company, our business is integral to our customers’ daily lives,” Crowley says. “So in our customers’ eyes, our security controls and ability to deliver a reliable service become incredibly important, and it’s a responsibility we take incredibly seriously.”
He says AWS immediately addresses customers’ security concerns because AWS publishes service organization control (SOC) reports, which are based on third-party examinations evaluating how AWS achieves compliance controls and objectives. “The fact that we can rely on the AWS security posture to boost our own security is really important for our business. AWS does a much better job at security than we could ever do running a cage in a data center,” Crowley says. ”Hosting Slack in AWS makes our customers more confident that Slack is safe, secure, and always on.”
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Case Study: Condé Nast goes all-in with AWS Cloud. The company reduced costs by 40% and increased operational performance by 30-40%
About Condé Nast
Condé Nast is a well-established media and publications company known for producing high quality lifestyle content suited for everyone. As a result of going all-in into the AWS Cloud, the company reduced costs by 40% and increased operational performance by 30-40%.
In just three months, Condé Nast was able to migrate over 500 servers, one petabyte of storage, various mission critical applications (such as HR, Legal, and Sales), and over 100 database servers into the AWS Cloud. With this migration, Condé Nast can now create content faster, while improving organizational creativity, productivity, agility, flexibility and time to market.
Read more customer success stories or search by industry to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
Case Study: Online travel company Serko upgrades cloud storage, sees significant boost in database speed and cuts costs by $120,000 annually
To provide the best possible travel booking experience for its customers, Serko upgraded its Microsoft Azure–hosted Serko Online software to Microsoft Azure Premium Storage. With this updated solution, Serko will potentially increase database transaction processing by 300 percent, which will help it accommodate planned business growth. The company also estimates that it will trim database costs by US$120,000 annually.
Booking flights online is incredibly easy: in just a few clicks, you have your ticket. But behind the scenes, databases perform thousands of transactions—searching through hundreds of available flights—in milliseconds. If the process takes too long, another travel site is only a click away.
Serko knows this well, so the company fine-tunes its datacenter infrastructure continuously to ensure that bookings are lightning-fast. Based in Auckland, New Zealand, Serko is one of the leading online corporate travel booking and expense management firms in the Asia-Pacific region. Since its founding in 1994, Serko has been an industry innovator, serving some of the largest corporations and agencies in the region.
Corporate travel departments subscribe to Serko Online for booking and Serko Incharge for expense management. Both are software-as-a-service (SaaS) products that organizations use to simplify the process of booking, approving, and reconciling travel expenditures.
Move to the cloud, enable growth
Serko is growing domestically and in emerging markets such as India, China, the Middle East, and Singapore. Since early 2014, the company has more than doubled its staff, and it aims to more than double its number of travel transactions in 2016.
To accomplish this aggressive goal, Serko needs to ensure that its datacenter infrastructure can handle a dramatic increase in transactions. The company currently performs about 300 million transactions a week.
To scale database processing power quickly and smoothly, Serko migrated the entire Serko Online application—database, application, and web servers—from its Auckland datacenter to Microsoft Azure in 2013. “Moving Serko Online and other assets to Azure gave us instant infrastructure scalability and eliminated acquisition and management costs,” says Philip Ball, Chief Technical Officer at Serko.
Azure is a cloud platform with compute, storage, networking, and other services for creating and hosting applications in Microsoft datacenters. “Azure had the best pricing of several options, and it was better aligned to our strategy because we use a great deal of Microsoft software,” Ball says.
Serko Online uses Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 as its database layer and originally used Microsoft Azure Standard Storage. However, the solution entails an enormous number of input/output operations per second (IOPS), and the company saw a moderate slowdown in the database tier after moving Serko Online to Azure. “The performance degradation was barely noticeable, but we were concerned about what would happen when our transaction load increased significantly,” Ball says.
Upgrade to premium cloud storage
Microsoft approached Serko about testing Microsoft Azure Premium Storage, which stores data on solid-state drives (versus the hard disk drives used by Azure Standard Storage) and provides up to 5,000 IOPS and 200 megabytes per second (MB/sec) throughput. Serko worked with Microsoft to test Serko Online on Azure Premium Storage and plans to deploy the storage technology in its production environment.
For Serko Online, Serko uses 150 A-Series Azure Virtual Machines as front-end web servers attached to eight DS-Series Azure Virtual Machines that act as database servers running SQL Server 2014. The company uses 10 Azure Premium Storage Disks for its production environment—two for backup, two for SQL Server system databases and temporary databases, three for user SQL Server data, and three for user SQL Server logs. Serko continues to use Azure Standard Storage for its disaster recovery environment. All servers communicate with each other over Azure Virtual Network. Serko currently has more than 50 SQL Server databases ranging from 2 gigabytes (GB) to 65 GB in size.
Improve performance by 300 percent
By moving to Azure Premium Storage, Serko was able to boost its database performance from 2,500 IOPS to 8,000 IOPS per pooled disk, a 300 percent increase. “We handle more than 300 million SQL Server transactions each week using eight SQL Server Azure Virtual Machines,” Ball says. “With Azure Premium Storage, we envisage that our current virtual machines can scale to handle more than 500 million SQL Server transactions weekly. This will reduce our overall costs, which is key as we scale globally.”
As a result of this performance boost, Serko believes that it can use the same number of SQL Server database servers to support three times the transaction volume with no performance degradation. “The more reduction in database-tier wait time, the better performance we can deliver,” says Ball. “As our business expands, our customers won’t hit slowdowns as our transaction loads increase. This is critical to our competitiveness.”
Serko plans to upgrade to Microsoft SQL Server 2014 and will use SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups to improve performance further and gain high availability for disaster protection. During testing of AlwaysOn with Azure Premium Storage, Serko observed a 50 percent performance gain.
Reduce annual database costs
By using Azure Premium Storage in combination with DS-Series Azure Virtual Machines, Serko will be able to consolidate databases per each SQL Server instance, reducing its total number of SQL Server instances from eight to four. “With Premium Storage and the larger virtual machines, we’ll avoid [US]$120,000 a year on virtual machine and SQL Server licensing fees,” Ball says. “We can consolidate more customers onto fewer virtual machines and host larger databases.”
Gain flexibility and scalability
In addition to the Azure Virtual Machines used to run the Serko Online production environment, Serko uses Azure for its test, support, and customer staging environments—in total, 240 Azure Virtual Machines with more than 650 cores. In fact, everything except the company’s software development environment runs in Azure.
Serko developed and runs its Serko Mobile application using Microsoft Azure Cloud Services and uses Azure Service Bus as a message-passing layer between Serko applications and the many airlines and other partners with which it exchanges information. “We need the ability to scale our infrastructure quickly, and Azure gives us that,” Ball says. “We can deploy servers when we need them and shut them down when we’re done with them. Our goal is to get to a complete auto-deploy, auto-scale environment so we can quickly move software builds into production with no infrastructure hurdles. This will help the business grow.”
IT budgets are on the rise for many cities and counties, but technology executives in those local governments still have concerns about investment levels in certain key areas -- and in their ability to retain top talent.
Those trends are among the findings in a new survey by the Public Technology Institute and Deltek. Nearly 300 city and county IT executives were polled on their funding, organizational issues, staff and training needs, technology trends and relations with the vendor community.
Percentage of city/county IT leaders who expect budgets to increase
When asked how top government leaders view IT spending, 63 percent of respondents said their bosses view IT budgets as an "investment for saving money in other business areas." And while more respondents (47 percent) expect their funding to remain the same than to increase (44 percent), just 9 percent were bracing for IT budget cuts.
Concerns remain, however, about funding levels for certain categories of IT investments -- and especially for in-house IT staff.
Percentage of who believe an IT category is inadequately funded.
Levels of concern regarding loss of in-house IT staff over the next year.
Answer Options
Not Sure
Very Low
Low
Average
High
Very High
Hiring away by private-sector
6%
15%
20%
23%
28%
8%
Hiring away by public-sector
5%
15%
25%
31%
18%
6%
Retirement of staff
9%
28%
15%
23%
15%
10%
Staff quitting
5%
25%
31%
24%
10%
5%
Eliminating positions due to budget cuts
7%
39%
28%
15%
7%
4%
Nearly three-quarters of executives responded that their budgets for staff development, training, travel and education will remain the same in the coming year. And more than 70 percent of respondents said they were either dissatisfied, very dissatisfied or unsure in their ability to attract and hire architects / system designers, security / risk assurance personnel as well as developers / programmers.
Live and on-demand: Cloud fuels transformation in broadcasting
Posted September 10, 2015 by Rainer Kellerhals - Senior Business Development Manager, Worldwide Industry & Global Accounts, as written on Microsoft.com
A few years ago, pioneers in the media and cable industry began exploring cloud technologies, with early efforts largely focused on facilitating on-demand scenarios at lower cost.
This week at IBC, the cloud is everywhere. Media companies all over the world are adopting cloud strategies, not just for on-demand video, but also for live sports events and live entertainment, content management, editorial collaboration, audience analytics, and ad scheduling — from the back office, through production, to interactions with viewers themselves.
Moving operations to the cloud allows companies to set up a new program or even a new channel in a very short timeframe — without investing tens of millions of dollars. That elasticity is a key advantage, and so is the ability to support the multitude of content formats necessary today across smartphones, tablets, PCs, set-top boxes and gaming consoles. Through the cloud, companies can leave these formerly expensive technical challenges to their providers and focus on delivering great content and experiences.
If there’s one point that illustrates this shift, it’s the emergence of live broadcasting on cloud platforms. When something goes wrong with an on-demand movie, it can be annoying to say the least, but ultimately, viewers can always start the movie over again. That’s not the case with a live soccer match — interrupt that broadcast, and you may have a riot on your hands.
Sporting events don’t get much bigger than the FIFA World Cup Championship, which was streamed live by broadcast partner HBS using the innovative Diva player designed by Italian solution-provider deltatre.
Another European institution also made its way to the cloud this year, when Austrian broadcaster ORF and the European Broadcasting Union were able to stand up the entire infrastructure for the vastly popular Eurovision Song Contest, which is broadcast across 45 networks and reaches 200 million people worldwide. Using Office 365, Yammer and Microsoft Azure for the back-end infrastructure, ORF and EBU delivered apps for audience voting online, supported more than 1,700 journalists covering the event, and connected hundreds of volunteers along with countless TV stations and other partners.
These kinds of events are only getting easier. Recently, Imagine Communications, a global market leader in broadcast solutions, announced a partnership with Microsoft to make its studio-quality encoding and workflow engine Zenium available as a component of Azure Media Services. This new cloud-based solution will be demonstrated this week at IBC as the new Azure Media Services Premium Encoder, giving broadcasters a new tool to stream content to virtually any type of device, anywhere in the world. (Microsoft is announcing other new services and partnerships at IBC.)
Cloud technologies are also empowering broadcast journalists to achieve more when it comes to creating content. The cloud powers the x.news news-gathering engine from Austrian firm x.art. Technologies like Skype TX are enabling instant live coverage and live interviews from across the globe. The BBC and several broadcasters in Germany are using SharePoint-based solutions like the BBC’s Journalism Portal for editorial planning and collaboration across teams, sites and channels.
Historically such organizations have relied on separate editorial teams for online, television and radio services. Using standard productivity tools like Office 365, they can bring those processes together into one platform to share story proposals and coordinate content development for multiple channels, formats and languages.
Behind the screen, the cloud is also supporting business processes for media companies. One big theme we’re seeing in this regard is business intelligence. At IBC, the IM Group is showing a solution that can mine audience data, such as how many people have been watching a certain program, at what time, the viewers’ locations, what channel they tuned in from and what channel they switched to next.
IM Group’s solution can also combine that data with information from other sources such as social networks to analyze viewership and determine which audiences — age groups, genders, income brackets — have been watching a certain program, and what kind of social media resonance that program is creating. During a political debate, for example, IM Group is able to analyze spikes in activity on Facebook and Twitter around certain keywords and perform sentiment analysis on those comments.
With this capability, broadcasters can understand granular details, such as which plots people like or which characters they identify with, and actually use that information to adjust a show’s narrative and story arc. At the end of the day, it’s all about making their programming more commercially successful, increasing viewership and generating more revenue.
And that commercial side of the business — such as rights and royalties management, program planning and media sales — is also benefitting from the cloud. In addition to its Azure media encoder, Imagine Communications has launched CloudXtream, a cloud-based media and playout solution spanning advertising, traffic and billing, automation, and multiservice. Imagine has also announced its first customer running its Landmark advertising management solution, one of the most widely used in the industry, in the cloud.
In the old days when it cost $20 million to set up a new broadcast channel and purchase all the hardware, the satellite dish connections or the cable lines, the kind of agility we’re seeing today was simply not possible. But now, with the cloud, broadcasters have an entirely new world of technologies and tools to work with — and new ways of connecting with their audiences and monetizing their services.
Yelp Cuts Test-Run Times by 90% Using AWS
About Yelp
Yelp.com provides consumers with crowd-sourced reviews about local businesses. It connects its data centers to the cloud using AWS Direct Connect to access a range of AWS services for its Dev & Test, Automated Testing systems, staging areas, and production workloads. Using AWS, Yelp dramatically improved its development productivity by reducing test-run times by as much as 90 percent.
Azure Media Services announces new services and partnerships at IBC 2015
As written by Sudheer Sirivara, Director, Azure Media Services on September 10, 2015 Azure.microsoft.com.
Over the past six months, the Media Services team has aggressively added innovative new capabilities to enable content owners and partners to prepare, protect, distribute and monetize media in the cloud. We are seeing great momentum with our customers and partners, including the record-breaking successful stream of the 2015 Super Stream Sunday, the launch of Next Generation Sports Network (NGSN), F1 car racing on FujiTV’s NextSmart service, and Telenet’s new interactive “Play Sports” app.
Today at IBC in Amsterdam, we are thrilled to announce key new services, certifications and partnerships that further enable end-to-end cloud based media workflows, from camera to viewer. These include:
Live Encoding general availability
Live Encoding allows you to send a single bitrate live feed to Azure Media Services, have it encoded into an adaptive bitrate stream and deliver it to a wide variety of clients for delivery in MPEG-DASH, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, Apple HLS, or Adobe HDS formats. Generally available in the coming weeks, Live Encoding can be combined with dynamic packaging, dynamic encryption, sub-clipping, dynamic manifest manipulation, ad-marker insertion, and near-seamless live/on-demand capabilities to build comprehensive live and cloud DVR workflows.
Introducing Live sub-clipping and archive extraction
Building on the recent availability of our industry proven Media Encoder Standard and Premium, today we are excited to announce important new features to our live streaming platform. Media Encoder Standard now includes support for extracting sub-clips, i.e. taking a portion of the live stream and producing a new on-demand asset. Media Encoder Standard now also has the ability to extract live archives as MP4s for subsequent syndication. Click here for more information about how to get started with these new live asset editing features.
Google Widevine now supported for Content Protection
In addition to AES 128-bit clear key encryption and Microsoft PlayReady DRM content protection services, we are now adding support for Google Widevine Modular DRM dynamic packaging. Additionally, our new partnerships with EZDRM and Axinom enable you to deliver Widevine licenses to your devices and browsers and you can deliver a dynamically packaged multi-DRM stream that uses Common Encryption (CENC). Click here for more information.
Expanded reach for Azure Media Player
We launched Azure Media Player in April at NAB and we are seeing a phenomenal response and uptake. Over 4 million streams have already been served to websites and mobile apps using an embedded and customized Azure Media Player. With new support for Widevine DRM, the Azure Media Player can now playback encrypted video content in Google Chrome with Widevine through HTML5 and Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer browsers with PlayReady or AES. And yes, that means Chrome running on desktops, Android devices, and Macs! Additionally, Azure Media Player now has the capability to playback multi-language audio and continues to support WebVTT captions, screen readers and tabbing control.
Azure Media Indexer adds Custom Language Models
Our powerful speech-to-text engine, takes in an audio or video media asset, and returns the caption/index/keyword files. For example, broadcasters looking to make their catalogs available on the internet can use Indexer to automatically generate TTML subtitles. A new capability of Indexer, Custom Language Models, lets you use relevant text documents to augment the internal dictionary (language model) for the duration of your job. This will be extremely useful if you are indexing content with lots of non-standard words or technical jargon (i.e. scientific, law enforcement, industry) or specific brand names or proper nouns.
Imagine Communications integration for Broadcast Channel Cloud Playout
Visitors to the Microsoft booth at IBC can see a demonstration of how to setup and deploy a fully featured ‘pop-up’ channel solution and channels for disaster recovery. What would have formerly taken a broadcaster weeks to deploy can now be accomplished in minutes on Azure with all of the traditional integrated channel playout functions now cloud-enabled, including automation, branding, graphics, and file server capabilities.
Compliance certifications
With the Content Delivery and Security Association’s (CDSA) Content Protection and Security Program (CPS) certification, Azure Media Services is the only hyper-scale cloud media solution provider in the market offering encryption on the fly for both video-on-demand and live streaming broadcasts. With the validation of CDSA certification, asset owners on the Azure Media Services platform can rest assured that their content is protected with enterprise-grade security. Stop by the Microsoft IBC booth to pick up a copy of our CDSA CPS Implementation Guide.
The services, partnerships and certifications we are announcing this week in Amsterdam are helping us move the needle when it comes to scalable, secure, and cost-effective media workflows in the cloud. Combined with our rich ecosystem of partners, some of which are presenting within the Microsoft Booth at IBC, we offer a differentiated platform to enable your end-to-end media solution needs. Click here to learn more about Azure Media Services, and come visit us at IBC in Hall 13, MS1 and MS2.
Tech trends that will enable “what’s next” for cities
Microsoft CityNext puts a city’s people first, harnessing their ideas, energy, and expertise to create more sustainable and safer place to live, with access to citizen-centric services and quality healthcare and education. Microsoft CityNext solutions, alliances and programs can help governments, businesses, and citizens shape the future of their regions, cities and municipalities. Microsoft is uniquely equipped to enable this approach. No other company offers as broad a portfolio of secure, consumer-to-business software, devices, and services; as diverse a network of global partners to implement it all; and as extensive a history of successful education and social programs. In combination, all of this helps cities imagine and realize what’s next for their people.
While many cities are already well on their way toward modernizing their technology infrastructures, they will continue to face growing challenges as migration trends rise and citizen demands for public safety and other services increase. Microsoft CityNext is the bridge to help them meet these challenges in a phased approach, now and into the future.
Working together, Microsoft and our partners can provide cities with highly integrated solutions that will focus the most important technology trends — cloud, Big Data, mobile, and social — on their most pressing issues.
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