Don’t just take our word for it
Funimation, owned by Sony, is a prominent American entertainment company specializing in the localization, distribution, and streaming of anime and East Asian content. With a vast catalog of anime series and films, Funimation has become a leading platform for enthusiasts of Japanese animation in North America and beyond.
The Challenges
Funimation has experienced rapid and tremendous growth in recent years, and their core platform, known as Venue, had several issues that needed urgent attention to support global growth.
- Incidents & Downtimes: The platform relied on unmanaged instances with outdated software, which led to frequent incidents and prolonged downtimes.
- Slow Deployment Times: Their deployment process was time-consuming, requiring a full team's involvement for each change, often taking up to an hour to complete. Rolling back changes was also a cumbersome and risky process.
- High Latency: Funimation faced significant latency issues due to network distance, making it challenging to provide a seamless experience for users in different regions.
- Consistency Across Environments: They desired consistency in both development and production environments with search capabilities across multiple regions, necessitating robust Infrastructure Code and CI/CD automation.
With millions of users worldwide, they needed to find a way to deliver an exceptional user experience and enhance the responsiveness and stability of their search service.
The Solution
Funimation partnered with StratusGrid to modernize their infrastructure and development practices by leveraging a combination of certified expert engineers, prebuilt infrastructure code modules, and a robust AWS partnership.
- Infrastructure Modernization: Transitioned from EC2 to AWS Lambda, enhancing security and scalability.
- Streamlined CI/CD Pipeline: Implemented a modern CI/CD pipeline using AWS CodePipeline, replacing Jenkins. This streamlined the build and deployment process.
- Standardized Environments: Standardized configurations across different environments and updated Docker images to ensure consistency and reliability.
- Improved Rollback Process: The new infrastructure and deployment process facilitated easier and safer rollbacks in case of incidents, reducing the impact on users.
The Results
The modernization of Funimation's core platform resulted in substantial improvements:
- Global Responsiveness: Through regionally distributed cloud services, StratusGrid transformed Funimation's search service into a responsive platform for users worldwide. The deployment achieved low latency performance across multiple regions with maximum uptime.
- The average response time was reduced from more than 1 second to less than 300 milliseconds globally. This makes the users feel that the application is fluid, and they continuously receive results after each keystroke.
- Improved Development Efficiency: Development teams could now deploy changes independently without requiring extensive DevOps support, resulting in increased development efficiency. Deployment times went from up to an hour to around 15 minutes.
- Stability and Reliability: The transition to modern infrastructure and CI/CD practices ensured a more stable and reliable platform. Interruptions in service were significantly reduced after transitioning to the multi-region architecture, enhancing the platform's stability and reliability.
- Reduced Downtime: Funimation experienced a significant reduction in incidents and downtime, improving the overall user experience.
- Faster Feature Releases: The streamlined deployment process allowed Funimation to increase the frequency of feature releases, from one or two per week to one or two per day.
The collaboration between StratusGrid and Funimation has yielded remarkable results. Funimation now enjoys a search service with low latency, global reach, and multi-region capabilities, leading to a substantial improvement in user experience. This enhanced performance has resulted in increased user engagement and retention, positioning Funimation for further growth and success in the future.
StratusGrid: Your Partner in Modernization
StratusGrid's expertise and technology have empowered Funimation to expand their search service globally. By addressing challenges related to latency and consistency, Funimation has gained increased efficiency and scalability. If you're looking to modernize your applications and enhance your user experience, StratusGrid is poised to guide you through every step of the process.