movingimage offers companies cloud-based video management and streaming services. As a leader in their field, they’re all about reliability, efficiency and uninterrupted service at all times. With their crack DevOps and SRE experts, Polar Squad assessed their technology platform. Together, we ended up changing numerous aspects of movingimage’s tech stack and daily practices to impact their core business for the better.

The Berlin-based movingimage is very much on top of their game, using cutting-edge technologies and utilising SRE and DevOps practices to a large extent. As they had the need for more help in daily tasks as well as improving their tooling as practices, we started planning a project together. We agreed that an organisation like movingimage could benefit from a refresh: We were to review their existing architecture and provide improvement recommendations. Optimising the cost and infrastructure of Azure was our initial target, but as we got to know each other, movingimage saw the opportunity to boost other parts of their tooling and practices, as well.

“We started out with cloud platforms and optimising their role in our operations, but took the opportunity to review our tools and processes at a larger scale. We believe proactivity is the key to staving off technology debt and allowing our people to focus on what matters instead of fixes and troubleshooting”, states Ryan Scoville, CTO of movingimage.

The project

Our project with movingimage was comprehensive, as the company saw it as an important step to staying up to date with their tech stack and daily work practices. Here are some of the things we did together:

• Review of current architecture, complete with recommendations for improvements

• Suggestions for restructuring Azure to reduce costs

• Migration of one of the package management solutions to a newer version

• Customisable solution for logging and data storage

• Documentation, training and knowledge transfer

movingimage was a prime example of what often happens in a fast-moving, technologically savvy company: The tooling is advanced and company know-how is at a very high level. However, it can be challenging to slow down the pace periodically to be able to get key parts of the stack up to date. This is what an external partner can facilitate.

“In a service like ours, we need all our internal people constantly on the ball. Polar Squad’s contribution was valuable in that it enabled us to get up to date and renew our ways of working without our product being impacted by the work – that’s very difficult to pull off with internal resources”, states Scoville.

In a service like the one movingimage provides, it can be a challenge to find a safe way to migrate core components, in this case from Helm 2 to Helm 3, without interrupting the service or causing new problems. To carry out the migration, we developed custom metrics exporters for services and reports, created a production-like environment to test the migration. Some updates had to be carried out manually while ensuring the resources are up and running all the while. 

“The work is about fact-finding and finding creative solutions to impact daily operations as little as possible”, states Firas Fafi from Polar Squad Berlin. “With such a dynamic environment, the consultant needs to provide support for improving hard-to-manage resources and make on-the-go updates and improvements as easy as possible. This might call for creation of custom components to reduce the cost and efforts of doing it, and that’s what we ended up doing.”

Another point of improvement was the logging platform used by movingimage. A solution was in place, but it was starting to lag behind in scale and capabilities as the business grew. Video transcoding is an intense operation by nature, and to ensure smooth operations, there's a lot of logging and metrics generated each moment. The volume of data is very large, so we wanted to come up with a solution that performs fast even under a heavy load, and includes an extensive retention for all relevant data.

Results

In our cooperation, we achieved a lot of things fairly quickly. After assessing their current technological situation, we created a roadmap of improvements and set out to carry them out in short order. 

• The migration of core components from Helm 2 to Helm 3 was a success and the work carries on with Polar Squad’s proposals for refactoring, solutions and best practices for getting the rest of the components migrated.

• Workshops and knowledge transfer sessions ensured the experts of movingimage keep abreast of the quickly developing tools.

• Documentation was improved and created where missing, which enables faster work and quicker onboarding of new experts. 

• A new structure for logging enabled much longer data retention along with a much more robust solution.

The work was not without challenges: 

The movingimage team faced a heavy workload and still needed to carry out a safe migration with no adverse effects. The main takeaway from the project was the reaffirmation that the foundation and culture of an organisation is the key to enabling transformation within an organisation. 

“The cool tools and new technology of today can become your struggle tomorrow, unless you keep it up and maintain it well. Knowledge distribution across teams, along with proper documentation, ensures that the tools work for you and keep your experts happy and capable of doing the work efficiently”, states Fafi.

Looking to get your technology abreast your quickly developing company? Let’s talk!

Contact Lasse Mäki:
lasse.maki@polarsquad.com
+358 451 635 616