Our case study - Filmin

Filmin - Case Study

Filmin - Subscription Based Streaming Platform

Description of the Company for Case Study

Filmin is a subscription based streaming platform based in Barcelona and offering services in Spain, Portugal and Mexico.

2.5M

unique IPs/month

32M

threats blocked/month

100k

requests/minute

Executive Summary

Filmin had an exponential growth in the last year, fuelled by additional content and lockdowns that kept more people at home looking for quality content. During the past 12 months, subscriber numbers doubled and hours streamed by 10 fold which stressed nitations with the underlying infrastructure. Filmin wanted to increase their performance while also reducing the marginal cost of delivering the service.
Filmin company summary

How our Services Helped?

  • Noraina was able to provide instances with 256 vCPUs, 512GB of RAM and replicated solid state storage on a redundant 25Gb/s network (50Gb/s available per server).
  • Hosting it in one of the European Equinix Data Centers allowed us to provide plenty of connectivity and low latency to all the Filmin's subscribers and integration with the Cloudflare protection against Bots, DDoS and others that Noraina provides as a Cloudflare Partner.
  • Noraina also helped Filmin deploy a Disaster Recovery solution to a major Cloud provider where if disaster strikes, everything could be up and running within minutes.

Challenges

  • Filmin applications are tightly coupled with their datastores, so latency between application server and the datastore. The main result is that the services are stable and performant during the peaks of usage, performance has improved was critical to them.
  • After a few benchmarks and load testing, we found that the best performance was achieved colocating datastore and application in the same instance, and then replicating contents to be able to scale out.
  • While costs have been reduced. scale-up and scale-out, so we needed big instances and a high performance network to cope with the demand of the replication.

Results, Return on Investment, Future Plans

  • The main result is that the services are stable and performant during the peaks of usage, performance has improved was critical to them.
  • Filmin's previous bare metal provider topped at 72 VCPUs and for a bit more, Noraina can provide a 256 vCPU managed server that helps increase performance and reduce management costs as less datastores need to be managed. integration with the Cloudflare protection against Bots, DDoS and others that Noraina provides as a Cloudflare Partner.
  • Comparing the costs as a 3 year reservation and monthly costs of running the service, Noraina's solution costs 10% of what it would cost with one of the major Cloud providers