European Media Giant Taps OpenStack-AWS Hybrid Cloud to Reduce Time to Market, Improve Security and Lower Costs

• 基础设施即服务 (IaaS) - 云计算
• 基础设施即服务 (IaaS) - 混合云

• 商业运营
• 离散制造

• 云规划/设计/实施服务
• 数据科学服务
• 系统集成

ProSiebenSat.1 Group, a leading European TV broadcasting, digital content, and e-commerce company, faced challenges due to its decentralized structure. Each of its more than 20 business units and subsidiaries had a tailored approach to software development and platforms, leading to varied IT environments. This structure, while allowing teams to drive innovation and growth, also resulted in similar IT challenges across the board. Fast-paced markets required rapid and creative content development, and competitive forces yielded cost and data protection pressure. Provisioning of new servers often took days and hindered business agility. Some teams turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to speed up time-to-market, but 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.

ProSiebenSat.1 Group is a Munich-based media company that is now one of the largest in Europe. It is a leader in European TV broadcasting, digital content, and e-commerce. The company has built a strong business foundation with German and Austrian stations and multinational production, including popular shows like Germany’s Next Topmodel and Promi (Celebrity) Big Brother. ProSiebenSat.1 is constantly pushing into new markets such as HD content, streaming video, and travel websites, as well as new geographies including Hong Kong, Israel, and the U.S. Its maxdome video-on-demand portal has positioned the company atop Germany’s online video market with more than 60,000 titles for TV, PC, consoles, and mobile devices. ProSiebenSat.1, with 6,000 employees, ranks number one in German TV ads and reaches 42 million households across the region.

ProSiebenSat.1’s global IT team decided to explore state-of-the-art, unified software development and IT infrastructure. They sought a single platform that could meet all business units’ needs – availability, cost, security, and time-to-market. They evaluated the OpenStack cloud platform and found it met the company’s needs. Developers could access resources through APIs without talking to IT, which would reduce provisioning times from days to minutes. Operations teams could allocate resources but still maintain control through quotas and identity services. And both teams had visibility of available and used resources through portals and dashboards. The team also evaluated VMware’s vCloud but found it was more expensive and had limited APIs. Thus, the team confidently moved to conduct the validation on OpenStack. But they needed a technology partner to help. They had previously met Mirantis and reached out again. Immediately, the team found Mirantis to be an attractive partner because of its Use Case Validation Service, which includes the design, deployment, and validation of a customer specified OpenStack-based workload. The service also includes knowledge transfer, documentation, and ongoing support within a fixed cost and time frame.

• 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.
• For developers, centralized OpenStack IaaS delivers a best-of-class platform with test and development tools to enable DevOps practices. Virtual machines can be provisioned in minutes versus days, eliminating old routines of help desk tickets bouncing back and forth between groups.
• And developers now have the visibility to see what platform resources they’re using on a daily basis, which is important to their business.

• The first business unit to fully migrate to the new platform used only the OpenStack part of the cloud. After just two months, the organization saved a whopping 60% in hosting costs alone, due to its ability to tailor resources to what it actually needed, rather than having to overprovision resources because of rigidly predefined instance sizes with AWS.
• Currently, the company is hosting 15 e-commerce platforms on the hybrid cloud platform, deployed on hundreds of VMs, with most running on OpenStack and a significant portion on AWS. A small team cloud operators efficiently manages the entire platform, leveraging Salt’s automated configuration management capabilities to quickly provision resources on OpenStack and AWS.