Case Study

Fandor

“We present exceptional, hand-picked films to a community of film lovers and makers connected by meaningful and entertaining cinematic experiences.”
Michael Tuszynski
CTO

Problem - Inability to handle scalability and growth needs

Fandor is a subscription-based streaming service for indie films, documentaries and international features and shorts. While Fandor’s legacy Ruby-on-Rails application was fine for a small startup, they experienced scalability issues when they began including original programming in their offering. Load testing confirmed that their infrastructure couldn’t handle the increased volume. As a result, they spent a lot of time patching problems.

Solution - Kubernetes DevOps-as-a-Service Solution

Fandor leadership wanted to invest in the company’s future, and their team of Ruby and JavaScript engineers had long been talking about containerization. They identified the performance improvements and efficiencies they were looking to gain, then decided to make a radical change from a monolithic application infrastructure to a containerized infrastructure.

Because their needs and DevOps load varied, it would have been too expensive for their growing company to hire a full-time DevOps team. And while they wanted to go with Kubernetes, they weren’t sure how to pull it off at first. The solution was to hire ReactiveOps.

It used to be white-knuckle time when Fandor did a release. Not anymore. Within 2.5 months, Fandor began the migration process of a legacy monolithic application infrastructure to three new code bases and a brand new architecture. ReactiveOps’s DevOps team designed and monitored a solid system, which instilled confidence in Fandor’s team and freed up thier engineers to focus on other business-facing initiatives.

Outcome - EXCELLENT performance and a strong partnership

At one point, Fandor’s cluster encountered problems. ReactiveOps was able to rebuild the infrastructure on new hardware within hours with no outages. The scaling worked the way it was designed, making it an example of how the infrastructure is serving Fandor’s day-to-day needs.

ReactiveOps laid down a solid infrastructure, and now Fandor is building on top of it. Fandor is now in the process of implementing new administration features and migrating their entire video streaming service onto Kubernetes. In the future, Fandor will be migrating their iOS, Android, Apple TV, Android TV, Roku and others apps on smart TVs.

In the past, Fandor had had other third-party engagements, so they were initially skeptical about working with ReactiveOps. However, they came to trust ReactiveOps to reliably manage and monitor their infrastructure. Fandor made choices based on their specific business challenges and chose the right tool – Kubernetes – and team partner – ReactiveOps.

What Fandor is saying

“In the past, we did as much firefighting as product design and innovation. RO changed all that. Their responsiveness has been phenomenal. Our team now gets to focus on the development work they want to be doing. From my perspective, it’s all about who you surround yourself with. From the start, RO’s service and responsiveness have been phenomenal. We’re impressed.”
Michael Tuszynski
CTO