Cloud Migration for Podcast Hosting Service

About

Firstory

Launched in 2019, Firstory is Taiwan’s leading podcast hosting platform, empowering podcasters to distribute content globally and connect with audiences. Now spanning 190+ countries and hosting over 300K episodes, Firstory offers creators unlimited storage and bandwidth, enabling unrestricted growth. Additionally, Firstory introduced a membership mechanism and DAI ads function, allowing podcasters to monetize efficiently and dynamically. The number of active shows powered by Firstory is growing at a monthly rate of 10%.

Challenge

Firstory Faced Challenges in Reducing Costs and Maintaining Global Service Availability

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Firstory considered migrating its services to AWS to maintain high service standards and optimize costs. However, the migration needed to be accomplished with no more than 4 hours of downtime to ensure service availability for its users across multiple regions and time zones.

Firstory's key challenges:

Excessive Costs: Reducing excessive outbound fees due to cross-cloud transfers
Limited Downtime: Minimizing the downtime to maintain service availability across multiple regions

Solution

Reducing Costs and Streamlining Firstory's AWS Migration

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Going Cloud, leveraging its comprehensive expertise in cloud migration, provided the following solutions for Firstory:

Cost Optimization: Migrating the existing service to AWS and leveraging AWS CloudFront for CDN maintenance to reduce outbound fees.
Simplified Operations: Adopting the AWS 7R migration strategy to move services from GCP to AWS, simplifying production deployment and reducing personnel costs.
Seamless Migration: Using Amazon Relational Database Service to support the migration, keeping downtime under 4 hours.

MSP Service

Going Cloud provide 5*8 service offer services including anomaly monitoring and application performance monitoring to optimize the overall architecture in real time.

Operational Excellence: By migrating to AWS with Going Cloud’s assistance, Firstory can focus on innovating their products rather than managing heavy infrastructure and capacity tasks. AWS CloudFront automates scaling based on traffic, reducing manual intervention. It adjusts resource allocation during traffic spikes, ensuring service stability and availability while lowering computation and traffic costs through caching mechanisms. This alleviates the need for daily server scaling and reduces costs from repeated or high-volume requests.

Cost Optimization: Going Cloud provides regular billing support to review Firstory's cloud usage and offers cost optimization recommendations. This includes adjusting resource allocation, using more cost-effective services, and helping Firstory reduce costs through AWS Reserved Instances/Savings Plans.

Performance Improvement: Despite Firstory’s initial decision to not upgrade RDS MySQL 5.7 due to business considerations, Going Cloud’s tech support facilitated an upgrade to MySQL 8.0 using Snapshot restore technology, significantly enhancing RDS performance and security.

Reliability: A custom backup plan is established based on agreed RTO and RPO, with regular incident simulation drills to ensure the reliability of Firstory’s services.

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Solution Architecture

Utilizing Rehost Strategy to Migrate to AWS Cloud

Result

Successful AWS Migration Reduced Costs by 30% and Improved User Experience for Firstory

In this collaboration, we successfully assisted Firstory in migrating to AWS, enabling cost and labor reduction as well as enhanced user experience.

Cost Reduction: Eliminating outbound fees achieved a cost reduction of 30%.
Lowered Labor Costs: Integrating all services into AWS simplified product management and streamlined production deployment, reducing labor costs by 25%.
Enhanced User Experience: Reducing latency improved the user experience, enabling Firstory to continue providing excellent service to its vast user base.