High-Profile, Global Brand in the Motion Picture and Film Industry
Location: Toronto, Canada
Industry: Media and Entertainment, Non-profit
Our objective was to develop a globalization strategy for a content-rich website that would address the high latency and slow performance issues that our client’s website visitors were experiencing outside of the local area.
Our Approach
A content rich website accessed by a large worldwide audience was experiencing major performance degradation.
This high-profile brand which operates within the motion pictures and film industry needed to develop a globalization strategy that would address the high latency and slow performance that visitors outside of the local area were experiencing.
We proposed an Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN), which provides an easy way to distribute content to end users around the globe. CDN technology allows content rich websites that are typical in the media and entertainment sector, to rapidly scale to meet user demand all over the world on multiple devices and platforms.
In the first stage of the project, website content assets were migrated to Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), utilizing a synchronization tool provided by Amazon. Upon successful synchronization of content, the objects were published onto the CloudFront CDN and replicated across geographies. Static content such as images and files now get cached on the CDN, meaning that files are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. Only a few transactions that are dynamic in nature will go back to the local servers. “We saw immediate performance gains by migrating the website content onto the CloudFront service. This demonstrates the power of the public cloud,” said CDW’s Solution Architect.
Solution
Through Amazon CloudFront’s web services interface, we organized the website content into distributions that specified the locations of the original file versions.
We worked with the client to deliver several performance optimizations that accelerated the delivery of the site, including implementation of persistent connections with the origin and other network path optimizations to speed up the delivery of dynamic content. Each end user is routed to the Amazon CloudFront edge location closest to them, in terms of internet latency. Then, their requests are carried back to the origin server running in AWS on connections that are monitored and optimized for performance.
Amazon CloudFront also reuses existing connections between the Amazon CloudFront edge and the origin server reducing connection setup latency for each origin request. Other connection optimizations are applied to avoid internet bottlenecks and fully utilize available bandwidth between the edge location and the viewer. This speeds up the delivery of dynamic content and provide viewers with a consistent and reliable, yet personalized experience, when navigating the website.
Highlights
- Content rich website accessed by global audience
- Low cost public cloud storage and content delivery
Technology
- Amazon CloudFront (Global Content Delivery Network)
- Amazon S3 (Storage in the Cloud)
What We Did For This Client
- Implemented a low cost solution, leveraging the power of the public cloud
- The website is now highly optimized and users are no longer experiencing latency and slowdowns
