Effortless Infrastructure at Scale in Audio Entertainment
Gaming & Entertainment - Americas
Business Overview
Business Focus
Gaming & EntertainmentBased in the United States
Business Case
This Leading audio entertainment company plans the containerization of 8,000 satellite streams with Portainer.
Container Platforms
Docker and Swarm
Background
From satellite pioneer to cloud champion, this leading audio entertainment company has undergone a remarkable transformation. Today, it’s more than just radio; it’s a vast audio empire encompassing music, talk shows, comedy, sports, and even live concerts, delivered to millions of subscribers through satellite, online streaming, and in-vehicle receivers.
Embracing the cloud and containerization has been a game-changer. This shift allows them to scale their infrastructure effortlessly, roll out new features with lightning speed, and keep their platform fresh and competitive. They’ve optimized resource usage, slashed costs, and secured their place as a leader in the ever-evolving audio landscape, proving that innovation can propel even traditional giants into the future.
Addressing the Challenge
Behind the scenes, this audio entertainment company relies on advanced infrastructure to deliver hundreds of curated channels to cars, homes and mobile devices 24/7 with no interruptions. The five person Broadcast Engineering Team is responsible for managing much of this back-end. Today they are expanding key use cases between engineering and operations managing 8000+ satellite radio channels.
Some core benefits their team gets from Portainer currently:
Stop/Start Application
- Portainer allows their engineers to easily stop and start containerized applications using the dashboard. This facilitates restarting apps to resolve issues.
Deploy Updates
- Pushing updates to containers is simplified within the platform. It automates multi-step processes engineers had to do manually across multiple servers.
Triage Problems
- Centralized logging and metrics across the container environment help engineers efficiently pinpoint the root cause when production applications face problems.
The Solution
With only a few applications under management, the savings may seem modest now. But once live production workloads are migrated, the efficiencies will be substantial.
A major upcoming initiative for this audio entertainment company is consolidating their numerous music, talk and sports stations onto Docker container infrastructure behind the scenes. This will allow dynamic allocation of compute resources matching what each genre and audience size demands.
Their initial target is supporting 8000 satellite radio streams on 250 Docker nodes, with potential to scale much higher. Portainer will be instrumental in making this transition successful while keeping the same team size.
The Results
Some of the key benefits the engineering team sees from managing major apps via containers:
- Real-time health monitoring to spot outages faster
- Granular control over permissions and access
- Automated container spin-up saves manual effort
They also noted how it helps bridge skill gaps, enabling their Windows-centric Broadcast Support Engineers to handle Linux virtual machines more independently.
The Broadcast Engineering Team estimates the new infrastructure could add 25% more workload without automation. Portainer may help offset as much as 20% of that via simplified deployments, scaling, and troubleshooting. Less escalations also multiply savings.
"What would be perfect is we don’t even have to manage it. The only thing we would do is upgrade Portainer...We just give our engineering support team the permissions that they need and they could look at everything.”
By leveraging Portainer to streamline management of core audio delivery infrastructure, they can optimize costs and reliability even as complexity rises. Just as importantly, it frees talented staff like the Broadcast Engineering team to focus more strategic initiatives that create the next-generation listening experience. Efficiency is crucial for the team due to a backlog of projects. Another initiative the team is tasked with is expanding their ad platform to all 8,000 channels.
This would better unify and standardize ad insertion across radio streams.
The more seamless the back-end operations become, the faster they can deliver innovations subscribers will love - like personalized channels, enhanced on- demand libraries, and expanded real-time content.
If Portainer helps them take satellites out of the picture, replacing with efficient auto-scaling container architecture, it may pave the way to enjoy their audio entertainment anywhere on any device. Achieving that flexibility while reducing operational burden is very meaningful value.
Key Achievements
Portainer helps offset 20% of added operations workload from new infra for 7 team members. ($100k pay x 7 people x 25% increased workload x 20% productivity benefit = $35,000 saved).
Monitoring and scaling 250 nodes manually would require added staff. Reduces needs by 2 or more engineers that would cost $100k+ annually.
Node health alerts can avoid minutes-long failover incidents that impact customers and help achieve high availability.
Key Quotes
“The help for us is not having to be called upon to troubleshoot problems because the operations team has the appropriate access and, with Portainer, can do it themselves”
“Because we are streaming audio, there’s always going to be a blip there, which makes us highly dependent on our monitoring.”
“It would require a significant addition, like 2 or more full-time employees to perform update tasks across 250 nodes without Portainer.”
