Sky TV Uses AWS To Set Up A Hybrid Cloud Environment

Sky Network Television New Zealand has created a hybrid cloud environment using AWS and OpenStack, which it is confident will cut the time taken to deploy new projects and make changes to its products.

This project began when developers were asked to create an online video player Rio Olympics last year, and though initially created for the coders at the TV provider, this new Amazon Web Services backed environment can also be used by other business functions.

They now actually have access to a self-service portal that can be used to spin up instances.

And although Sky already had an existing on-demand player called SkyGo, it backed onto on-premises physical and virtual hardware. Which is why the company believed it would not scale or reach the performance benchmarks required

This then led to the player being re-architected to run on cloud instead:

As infrastructure architect Jean-Pierre Senekal revealed:

“We ended up going into AWS initially which turned out pretty well because the way we approached it was well-architected and there was buy-in from all the different stakeholders – including security and networks – right at the start. The way we did it was to template everything and automate it.”

According to Senekal, Sky TV NZ decided it wanted to transfer that capability that they had in the public cloud into their on-premises environment. And to quickly accomplish that, the company turned to HPE’s Helion OpenStack cloud infrastructure product.

The firm has been using OpenStack in production for around three months.

And with the OpenStack environment still very young right now, the company is currently ironing out the challenges posed by a hybrid app, optimizing the elements in both AWS and OpenStack to interact with its unique DNS requirements.