Performance Matters, Especially in the Music Industry - Global Hybrid Infrastructure Makes Artists Sing - Sponsored by GoGrid
Learn first-hand how Microgroove leveraged physical and virtual infrastructure components in creating a high-performance, cost-effective cloud environment for the music industry. One which easily supported their need for cloud scalability coupled with the permanence and single-tenancy of dedicated servers - a hybrid solution not found in commodity clouds. Microgroove's technology platform running on GoGrid is powering hundreds of popular artists' sites including Snoop Dogg to Yani as well as an eCommerce site of over 1.5 million SKUs.
Presentation done by Brett Nagy (Technical Director - Microgroove) & Michael Sheehan (Technology Evangelist - GoGrid)
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Microgroove (GoGrid Customer) Presentation at Cloud Connect 2012
1. Performance Matters, Especially in the Music Industry
Microgroove & GoGrid
How to create a
high-performance,
cost-effective
cloud environment
Brett Nagy (Technical Director – Microgroove)
Michael Sheehan (Technology Evangelist – GoGrid)
2. Introductions
Brett Nagy
• Technical Director – Microgroove
Michael Sheehan
• Technology Evangelist – GoGrid
2 February 2012
3. About GoGrid – A leader in the IaaS Market
“Visionary”
Leading IaaS provider Magic Quadrant
Strong Track Record of “First-To-Market”
Features “Champion”
Quadrant
World-class platform for infrastructure
management “Market Leader”
Thousands of Customers Across All Industries
“10 Cloud
GoGrid outperforms competition by over 4 x Computing
in third-party benchmarking tests Companies to
Watch”
GoGrid owns 100% of its IP “Top 10 Best Cloud
Computing Providers”
3 February 2012
3
4. Microgroove – A Platform for the music industry
Microgroove-developed software is currently deployed on hundreds of high-traffic
web sites, transacting content, community and dollars, every moment.
Over 500 Major Recording Artists Powering the World’s Biggest Record Labels
4 February 2012
5. Millions of Content Items
Over 100,000 Artists
1.5 Million Tracks
50,000 Tour Dates
Millions of Members
Millions of Posts
Meta Data support
from Bach to Lady Gaga
5 February 2012
6. Billions of Data Transactions
By Millions of Active U/U’s
Direct to Consumer Sales
White Label Stores
Media Views
Social Networking
Ad Integrations
International Presence
6 February 2012
7. Microgroove Ecosystem
Licensable CMS platform,
built for the music industry
Developer Community: SDK
& API
Mobile: Native + Web Apps
Content Syndication &
Affiliates
7 February 2012
9. The Need to Grow & Evolve
Reduce time to on-board new
customers
Direct access to our own software
No data center environment
Needed Management and Support
requirements
• Needed SLA & Dependable 24x7
Support team
Ability to Stage environments
9
10. Long Distance “Management” Challenge
Servers
hosted &
managed
Audience No All
HERE direct
located access
Managed
HERE HERE
10 February 2012
11. Challenges
Rapid deployment – needed to roll out a new version of the Microgroove Platform every 4
weeks
IT Staff utilization- Did not want to hire NEW staff to sit and watch servers
Burstable traffic
Two specific customer challenges
• Hosting & Managing large number of individual artist websites
• Hosting GetMusic.com.au (music portal)
TOO
MUCH
MANAGEMENT!
Microgroove HQ
11 February 2012
12. Going Cloud
What was the challenge?
What was the research?
What was the technical solution?
What were the results?
What lessons were learned?
12 February 2012
13. What was the technical challenge?
What Microgroove was trying to accomplish:
• Deliver the Microgroove Platform as a PaaS
• Not worry about hardware or data center management
• Serve international markets
Technical Details:
• Strong Windows support
• Avoid re-architecting the Microgroove Platform
• Needed a high-performance solution for data intensive transactions
• Scale-up and down easily
13 February 2012
14. What was the research?
Started search Q4 of 2009
7 years of self-hosting & supporting other
people’s hosting = hands on experience
Some experience in co-location hosting
Wasn't looking for a "cloud provider" - just
wanted "easy to manage”
Initial research focused on management
consoles, not service providers
14 February 2012
15. Short List Results – Narrowed to 2 Providers
Provider #1 GoGrid
Completely virtualized Hybrid environment
environment means shared 1st-class Windows Support
hardware
Physical servers for high I/O data
Competing Read/Writes transactions
Cost structure optimized for Virtual servers for scalability
bursts of compute time
CDN for media delivery across the
Windows images not as current as globe
Linux images
Cost : Performance ratio was good
Windows pricing more expensive
Persistent server images & attached
than Linux
data
15 February 2012
19. Architecture Details
PRODUCTION STAGING
NGINX Load Balancing Tier Staging Servers
• Cloud-based single-core servers (scalable) • Upload point for SDK-based sites
• CentOS 5.3
• Connects to production databases
• Also serves images from Cloud Storage
• Doubles as application servers
Web Servers
• Cloud-based 8-core servers (scalable) Document Database Servers
• Windows 2008 / IIS 7 • “NoSQL” DB Servers
• Uses Raven DB + Map/Reduce
Database Servers • Currently used for specific reporting tasks
• Dedicated 8-core servers
• MS SQL Servers for 100+ sites
Cloud Storage
• All CMS-uploaded static assets
• Accessed via UNC paths
Content Delivery Network
• Images and other static files
• Pulled from Cloud Storage
19 February 2012
20. Why were these choices made?
Cloud Servers
• Deployed to separate hardware nodes
• Persistent storage
• Scalability via MyGSI server imaging to facilitate rollout of additional servers
Physical Servers
• Performance & high I/O
NGINX
• Highly configurable reverse proxy
• Failover for redundancy
Cloud Storage
• Repository of product and artist images
CDN
• Delivery of content over 7500 miles with multiple PoPs
Firewall
• Direct, private connectivity via VPN from Microgroove to GoGrid infrastructure
20 February 2012
21. Long Distance Content – SOLVED!
Audience Infrastructure All
located CDN located Managed
HERE At HERE
GoGrid
21 February 2012
22. What were the results?
Went from hosting 3 sites to over 100 sites
On-boarding new customers in hours instead of weeks
400% reduction in page load times
Direct access to own software more freedom to innovate
Ongoing performance tuning is easier do more of it now
22 February 2012
23. What lessons were learned?
Windows is Windows, wherever it’s hosted
Scale-out still needs to be planned-out
Dedicated hardware = predictable performance
23 February 2012
24. Future
What are the plans for the future?
What are the key takeaways?
How to craft your Cloud Fingerprint
24 February 2012
25. What are Microgroove’s plans for the future?
Multi-data center failover
Auto-scaling – using metrics from monitoring API
Completely automating new customer provisioning
25 February 2012
26. What are the key takeaways?
Moving to the cloud doesn’t have to mean
re-architecting existing software
Don’t throw out the dedicated hardware just yet
26 February 2012
27. Contact & Customer Case Study Download
GoGrid Contact Information: Download the Full Case Study
www.GoGrid.com To download the Microgroove Case Study,
Telephone - 1-877-946-4743 please click here:
International - +1(415) 869-7444 http://go.gogrid.com/case-study/microgroove
Twitter - @GoGrid
Facebook – Facebook.com/gogrid
LinkedIn - LinkedIn.com/company/gogrid
Note: you must have Adobe Acrobat installed to view the Case
Study
27 February 2012