Rewriting a Streaming Platform into a Modern, Scalable, AWS-Based System

ADN is the largest French-language animation streaming platform. The client’s challenge was downtime during high traffic. Netguru supported the client in following goals: rebuilding the platform with a focus on long-term stability, decreasing downtime and preparing the platform for handling a higher volume of traffic.

The competitive video streaming market demands a lot from streaming platforms, even when they’re targeting a narrow niche.

Anime Digital Network (ADN) offers an attractive selection of animation streaming to French speakers living in Europe. The platform uses an advanced video recommendation solution, which learns from users’ behavior and helps them find content they will enjoy.

Maintaining user trust and meeting expectations – challenges

In countries where French is a commonly spoken language, ADN is the most successful and most often visited anime streaming platform on the market. It uses a subscription model and works hard to maintain the good relationship it has with its user base. This has become difficult due to several challenges:

Downtime during high traffic that could hinder users in receiving the service,
Unsatisfactory website performance,
Outdated technology (PHP, Joomla),
Legacy technology and an inefficient setup that prevented the platform from scaling.

Due to highlighted challenges it was difficult to introduce new planned features.

Modernizing a popular streaming platform – scope of the project

ADN’s plan for solving the problems mentioned above included:

Rebuilding the platform with a focus on long-term stability, scalability, and innovation,
Decreasing downtime during high traffic and providing a flawless user experience,
Preparing the platform for handling a higher volume of traffic,
Achieving zero downtime during new releases,
Creating a separate testing environment.

Netguru were responsible for achieving all this. On the technical side, the project’s scope was:

The migration of the platform from a Joomla/PHP framework to Node.js,
Rewriting the frontend of the app in React,
Introducing cloud infrastructure,
Adding microservices,
Optimizing the database.

Throughout the project, we supported and advised the client to help them achieve the best possible results.

Delivering a high-quality streaming experience and overcoming the challenges of high-traffic streaming

The main business goal of the project was to support ADN’s expansion strategy towards increasing their competitive edge and market leadership. We achieved it by:

Preparing and executing a 5-day workshop. It resulted in a comprehensive report on the then-current state of the Platform, and suggestions on how to tackle the rebuild.
Rebuilding the ADN platform in a way that increased its long-term stability, scalability, high availability, and potential for innovation.
Balancing out the platform’s technical debt and delivering new features based on technological or business interdependencies and a defined roadmap strategy.
Consulting and supporting ADN in the scoping and delivery of their 2021 roadmap of projects, in alignment with their growth strategy.
Introducing fast and simple delivery of new system functionalities.
Continuous maintenance of platform architecture and infrastructure. We prioritized cost optimization and performance.

We used the AWS cloud environment as a solution for a highly scalable database, cache control, autoscaling in the ECS, as well as DDoS and other popular attack detection thanks to the WAF rules. Thanks to GitLab CI, we were able to implement an automatic deployment process.

Results of our work

The old platform built in PHP has been turned into a modern, scalable and performant cloud video streaming solution, allowing ADN to enhance their competitive advantage.
The product is ready to handle big traffic.
The CI/CD pipelines are primed for the whole development processes, including integration, building, testing, and deployment.
ADN now has the option to test their solutions before releasing them, which improves user experience and minimizes the risk of error.
The client’s business can continuously grow thanks to the autoscaling solutions implemented in the AWS environment.
The platform is stable and ready for future endeavours.