The BIGVU platform allows small businesses and professionals to create and edit marketing videos, with a popular Teleprompter app that makes it easy for users to record videos and use scripts with confidence. Established in 2016, the company has a website and a mobile application, both of which cater to both free and paid users.
BIGVU was in the process of digital transformation and was looking for ways to boost availability, security, and scale, as well as to enhance its knowledge about AWS. The company needed a more secure platform and greater expertise in order to support its quick growth. With AllCloud’s support and know-how, BIGVU onboarded AWS Beanstalk and revolutionized its systems. In less than 2 months, the company infrastructure became highly available with zero down-time, deployed in two availability zones as a failsafe, and with VPCs separating environments for best practice security. BIGVU AWS environment has now become future proof.
Being a small company with headquarters in the United States, and just 2 developers working in Israel, BIGVU was experiencing quick growth in line with its company success. The BIGVU infrastructure was already running on AWS, in order to handle their anticipated load increase, they want to make sure their infrastructure was optimal in terms of scale, availability, and security. BIGVU was looking to work with an AWS partner to increase their familiarity and knowledge of AWS best practices.
BIGVU was looking to improve in a few key areas:
BIGVU Chose AllCloud to Help Address the Gaps in its Current AWS Strategy
After several positive recommendations, including from AWS professionals, BIGVU asked for an initial meeting with AllCloud. Here, the CEO of BIGVU could ascertain the platform’s current situation in more detail. AllCloud explained the gaps in the system and the reasons behind the customer experience issues that BIGVU was experiencing. The CEO enlisted AllCloud’s support in optimizing its environment and reducing the overall level of risk to the business.
“We were growing fast and knew we should prepare for the future. It was important for us to learn and implement AWS best practices that would tighten security, handle higher load volumes and guarantee optimal performance moving forward. We wanted to take our architecture to the next level so we turned to AllCloud, an AWS Premier Partner, for support.” – Ben Basha, R&D Team Leader, BIGVU
Choosing the Right Tools for the Job
AllCloud supported BIGVU with a DevOps engineer onsite, who had AWS experience, guiding the team in both best practices and what tools and processes would be practically beneficial for the company. While the idea of working with EKS or container systems was exciting for BIGVU, AllCloud recognized that this may not be maintainable in the long run, and that the developers would need to take on a steep learning curve to work with this technology. Instead, AllCloud suggested AWS Beanstalk, and then helped the business onboard the solution. This was a smart compromise that comes with all of the benefits of a containerized environment, but with a shallower learning curve and offering a simpler journey from end to end.
“BIGVU wanted to move very quickly, and we built a solution that would support this. Implementation of a new AWS environment took less than 50 days, including data migration, DNS changes, and the launch of new environments.” – Shachar Carmel, Cloud Solution Architect, AllCloud
Today, thanks to AllCloud’s design and implementation expertise, BIGVU has halved its monthly AWS billing, dramatically reduced error rate, and more than doubled its paid users.
Increased development: The optimized environment has allowed BIGVU to focus on development and new feature releases, increasing its team from 2 developers when starting with AllCloud to 6 developers within 6 months’ time.
A Million Users: BIGVU has seen a major increase in users. The app is downloaded every minute and has surpassed a million downloads on both the iOS and Play marketplaces.
Cut Costs in Half: AWS best practices alongside ongoing cost optimization sessions with AllCloud’s FinOps team has revolutionized the BIGVU bottom line. BIGVU pays for what it uses, only running resources where it’s necessary, and using auto-scaling during peak periods when it needs to support more users and traffic.
Zero Downtime: The BIGVU system is now highly available, distributed into two AWS availability zones. If one fails, the system is still up and running. Despite the huge growth, end-users, therefore, have no break in the performance or in the uptime of the application. BIGVU can now scale with confidence.
Significant Decrease in Error Rate: The system architecture is enhanced for speed, along with an ongoing plan for success. The platform now benefits from automatic deployment and automatic pipelines that BIGVU can choose to control manually where necessary. BIGVU can find and solve bugs much faster, improving its error rate substantially.
Best in Class Security: Multiple user environments are now isolated with VPCs for best practice security. This includes development, testing, QA, and only then, production. With Infrastructure as Code, the developers can build their total workload very quickly in a separated environment, controlling their resources in granular detail.
Completely Future-Proof: BIGVU can now change the technology as they scale, or as the need arises. If in the future, the team expands, requirements change, and the company would like to use EKS or other more advanced services, this option is available to them.