As a group company involved in diversified operation, Oriental Pearl has rich online and offline businesses, including IPTV, OTT, games, mobile video, e-commerce, Oriental Pearl TV Tower cultural tourism, advertising, etc.. With the rapid development of various businesses, Oriental Pearl has also begun to face huge challenges. That is how to open up online and offline businesses so that it can be interconnected, share data, and promote each other to form an Internet media ecosystem covering "content, platform, channel and service".

Before the adoption of Amazon Web Services cloud services, the IT systems of Oriental Pearl's various businesses were deployed on different IDC and their own servers, which were not related to each other. This made it difficult to connect online and offline services and could not integrate and utilize various resources to promote the rapid development of business. For example, the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, the landmark building of Shanghai, has more than 5 million visitors each year. These user data are stored in the offline ticketing system and cannot be used for online business. If the Amazon Web Services cloud platform can be used to build a public cloud database, integrate offline and online data in the cloud database, and then use big data analysis to extract effective user information, they can make full use of the existing offline database and expand the user group of online business. On the other hand, the original multi-IDC deployment model not only formed an information island, but also required Oriental Pearl to invest more manpower to manage and allocate IT resources, making the cost of labor and time high.

In order to meet these challenges, Oriental Pearl learned and assessed a variety of technical architectures, and finally decided to use the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet and the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region operated by Xiyun Data to establish a hybrid cloud architecture covering all online and offline services, to establish a unified data storage, analysis, and processing system on the Amazon Web Services cloud, to gather data from the original IDC systems of various business modules into the public cloud, and to achieve online and offline business integration through the opening of business data.

"We chose the Amazon Web Services cloud platform based on three reasons: first is the extremely high security and stability of the Amazon Web Services cloud platform; second is that Amazon Web Services provides very rich modular functions that enable us to choose different cloud services according to business needs; the third is that Amazon Web Services has many successful cases at home and abroad for our reference, " said Fan Ruohan, Senior Vice President and Dean of Oriental Pearl New Media Co., Ltd.

The business range of Oriental Pearl is wide, and each business already has relatively mature IT solutions. Therefore, when using the Amazon Web Services cloud platform for integration, they don't want to simply find an outsourcing service provider to provide a package of solutions, but want more participation of technicians, so that the Amazon Web Services cloud services can be well integrated with the original system. Compared with the products of other cloud service providers, the Amazon Web Services cloud platform provides richer cloud service functions, covering IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS levels. These service functions respectively belong to computing, storage and content distribution, database, networking, and management and security, analysis, application program services, deployment & management, and mobile services. The Amazon Web Services cloud services included in each category adopt a clear modular structure, and users can choose different services according to actual needs. Sufficient flexibility is provided in building application systems for users in this way. This kind of flexibility enables Oriental Pearl to choose to fully adopt Amazon Web Services cloud services to build the system when building a new business, and it can go online quickly in a short time. After that, with the maturity of the business and the increase of the number of users, some of the services can be gradually transferred to the original IDC system or self-built servers according to actual needs, and finally the hybrid cloud architecture can be realized. "The rich functions and modular structure of Amazon Web Services Cloud services allow us to quickly and easily build a hybrid cloud architecture that can quickly meet business needs while also saving costs. ” said Fan Ruohan.

Amazon Web Services has a wealth of successful cases around the world, covering all walks of life, providing new customers with excellent learning samples. Oriental Pearl operates in more than 30 cities across the country, has the domestic top multi-channel video integration and distribution platform, and has more than 32 million IPTV users. Its business model and construction requirements of IT system are similar to Netflix, a world-renowned video service provider, and the latter is a successful user of the Amazon Web Services cloud platform. Its entire business system is deployed on the Amazon Web Services cloud platform. Its business deployment method provides a good reference for Oriental Pearl.

In addition, the complete product documentation and strong premium support team of Amazon Web Services are also valued by Oriental Pearl. Amazon Web Services's professional technical team can provide customers with premium support services from technology assessment to technology implementation and product deployment throughout the life cycle. In the process of Oriental Pearl on the cloud, the professional Amazon Web Services service team provides comprehensive and fast support services from overall planning, coordinated docking testing to project launch, etc.

Oriental Pearl became a priority user of Amazon Web Services China in 2015, and began to use the Amazon Web Services cloud platform to build a hybrid cloud in steps to achieve business integration. Through careful analysis of each business module, Oriental Pearl decided to first deploy the big data processing system of video transcoding and analysis of user data to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform. Video transcoding is a pure computing requirement, which can be achieved with only Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Web Services messaging components, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), relatively simple in technical solution and easy in implementation. Figure 1 is a diagram for the video transcoding architecture of Oriental Pearl.

Big data processing is the background business of Oriental Pearl. Due to the complexity of the underlying architecture of big data processing, it is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and costly. Therefore, before using the Amazon Web Services cloud platform, Oriental Pearl did not establish a complete big data processing system. Amazon Web Services's perfect big data processing architecture and cloud services enable Oriental Pearl to use cloud services such as Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon EMR to quickly build a cloud big data processing system Each business department only needs to upload data directly to the cloud, and can perform unified classification and processing in the cloud, which not only opens up online and offline businesses, achieves business-level integration, but also greatly saves labor costs and time costs. Figure 2 is a diagram for the data processing platform architecture of Oriental Pearl .

The use of Amazon Web Services cloud platform has brought benefits to Oriental Pearl in three aspects. The first is to build a hybrid cloud architecture through Amazon Web Services, establish a big data processing system in the cloud, perfectly integrate existing business systems, and achieve business-level integration. The second is to speed up the launch of new projects and save costs. Under the traditional IDC mode, the process of procurement and deployment of server takes at least one month, and now it only takes one day to complete the deployment of the new project. At the same time, with Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Auto Scaling, it is possible to flexibly scale up and down the system, which can meet the peak demand and reduce costs. The third is to try new solutions at low cost and quickly, and analyze and assess from various aspects such as business requirements, performance, and costs to optimize business systems.

After completing the migration from the traditional IDC model to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform, Oriental Pearl began the next step: comparing public cloud and hybrid cloud architectures, conducting more detailed cost considerations, and migrating all projects suitable for public cloud to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform. At the same time, projects that are more suitable for running on private clouds are also relocated to self-built servers. "This two-way use of the Amazon Web Services cloud platform helps us meet our business needs while minimizing costs, ” said Fan Ruohan. In the future, Oriental Pearl hopes to use more types of Amazon Web Services cloud services and continuously improve its hybrid cloud business platform to achieve a balance between functions and costs.