The challenge
NOW That’s What I Call Music! is the biggest selling compilation brand in the world. Since the release of the first NOW album in 1983, no one has come close to challenging this world-renowned label.
But with online streaming services having decimated physical formats, our task was to design, build and deploy a new, stronger AWS infrastructure for NOW Music Plus, the brand’s own streaming platform. Appropriately for such a popular brand, it had to be capable of performing efficiently under heavy demand and support the rapidly-growing user base.
With a rapidly-changing market, how could NOW ensure they stayed on top while catering to a digital audience?
The proposition
We first pitched our services for the NOW project through our partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Instead of using our time with the client to regurgitate standard lines about the benefits of the cloud, we asked questions about the project, driven by our curiosity and passion for the challenge.
We come from a development background. AWS is a purely operations-focused team. They chose us for our thorough research, obvious expertise and no-nonsense approach, and together, we created a cohesive partnership. Importantly, we supported NOW’s internal development team during and after the project.
The project journey
The infrastructure had been struggling when faced with particularly high demand. A marketing push could successfully generate a big uplift in new registrations, but the platform wasn’t fully optimised and couldn’t cope with the surge in traffic.
As part of the migration to the new AWS infrastructure, we moved the application to a set of microservices used in a Kubernetes cluster, to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of the NOW Music Plus app. This included day-to-day consultations with the development team as we identified the best approach to migrating and hosting the app, followed by a fully-managed service post-launch.
The impact
Leveraging Isotoma's experience with AWS, NOW Music Plus's infrastructure was reimagined
Using our experience in AWS operations to build a new infrastructure meant we could harness performance efficiency best practice to break down the application’s monolithic architecture and deploy AWS scaling tools across the cluster. The result is an application that doesn’t miss a beat, even when the volume of active users reaches a crescendo.
Case study
Creating a home for NCVO's digital properties on AWS
NCVO's digital properties had ended up as disparate websites, content management systems and other tools. This lack of consistency meant managing NCVO's digital properties was costly and time consuming and using them was jarring and confusing. They wanted partners who shared their values and ways of working agile, open and multi-agency- and who could figure out how to untangle and streamline their digital properties.
Get in touch
We craft trailored solutions for unique challenges, not off-the-shelf or one-size-fits-all. We thrive on finding beautiful answers to complex challenges, using our experience and expertise to create results you can rely on.
The Isotoma way
Teamwork is at the heart of everything we do - trusting our people has always been one of our key values. With mixed-function development teams, we run our projects along agile lines.
You may also be interested in...
