Birth of a Crowd Backed Platform: Epiqur

Epiqur is a hardware-enabled live broadcasting platform which enables musicians to broadcast, record and share their digital sessions in multiple social networks. Epiqur teamed up with Sufle to architect and build their environments on AWS to reach and serve millions of listeners in the most efficient manner. Sufle helped Epiqur to build their scalable and low cost environment on AWS from scratch without compromising speed and performance.

A Digital Stage for Online Audience

Epiqur is a hardware-enabled live broadcasting platform which is specialized in music and digital performance. Through Epiqur, anybody can broadcast from their stages, studio sessions, homes or anywhere they want. Epiqur also records these broadcasts in audio and video versions separately to be served afterwards. Besides its social platform which lets musicians interact with their fans, Epiqur also lets them earn money through their performances by selling digital access tickets, gathering donations or tips on the platform.

Building an Efficient Infrastructure from Scratch

While Epiqur serves digital performance to its audience, their infrastructure planning and operations needs to be so sophisticated that it becomes harder to handle as a startup business. Their first challenge was to achieve high speed to ensure that real-time events have the best performance for the audience. Besides speed, they needed a scalable architecture that is designed to meet variable demand from the target audience without any performance issues. As a newly-launched startup, achieving these business goals was hard in the face of a tight startup budget, unpredictable demand and limited expertise in cloud services. It would be really expensive and effortful for Epiqur to build their platform if they had to plan their workloads to be maintained on a traditional on-premise platform.

Epiqur Designs Their Efficient Architecture on AWS Cloud with Sufle

Epiqur and Sufle teamed up to architect and build Epiqur platform on AWS. The global services on AWS and pay-as-you-go prices were what they needed in the beginning. They needed the elasticity to keep up with the increasing demand and flexibility to scale and improve their operations over time with the lowest cost possible. The global infrastructure of AWS was another important key point to enable their business to reach millions of listeners around the world in seconds.

In addition to the need for scalable and reliable infrastructure design, Epiqur was also looking for a customized consultancy to better adapt to operating in the cloud. Sufle’s consultancy services for both the migration process and cloud adaptation afterwards were the main reasons for Epiqur to work with the Sufle team. As a newly-launched startup, Epiqur was looking for ways to successfully design a lightweight environment that any engineer can understand, adapt and maintain with minimum effort. Sufle’s Solution Architects ensured Epiqur that their all business needs were addressed and met in their customized solution offering. Sufle also kept providing consulting services following the cloud architecture project to help Epiqur team succeed in the cloud.

Fast, Durable, Scalable, Low Cost Environment

The first architectural decision was to build a loose coupled, scaleable and lightweight environment to empower Epiqur to manage their operations easily. Therefore, Sufle designed an infrastructure using AWS EC2, AWS S3, AWS Cloudfront and AWS Elasticsearch Service to run Epiqur on AWS with several other services to keep it running safe and sound. The whole infrastructure has been developed with Terraform, so it is possible for Epiqur to launch their new environments in seconds. Using the “infrastructure as code” approach also brought great additional benefits for Epiqur, such as automatic documentation and easier change management capabilities as they scale.

Sufle’s talented Solutions Architects have integrated Epiqur streaming services with AWS S3 and AWS Cloudfront to let Epiqur stream their live events to hundreds, thousands or even millions of people without any extra effort or issue. AWS S3 is also chosen to store streams for future on demand stream requests with very low cost and high availability.

AWS X-Ray, AWS Cloudwatch with custom metrics and particular custom developed helper functions provide full visibility to Epiqur team on their infrastructure. With the help of advanced visibility, the development team easily gets insights to successfully identify and troubleshoot the root cause of any issues and errors.

Sufle and Epiqur architected the ultra lightweight application for Epiqur with minimal CPU and memory footprint, so that the applications are able to run even on t3.small instance type. Sufle has built an automated deployment process that creates pre-baked EC2 AMIs and lets the autoscaling do the rest without any manual operation.

Fast and Performance Efficient Platform Reaching the Global Audience

With the solid output from both Sufle and Epiqur teams and support from AWS Activate program, Epiqur is able to focus on business operations and expand their startup by means of their ultra-low cost and scalable architecture without any issue and concern. The AWS Activate Program that is designed for startups provided the financial support for Epiqur, which is what they needed in the beginning to start building their architecture without worrying about the costs. The auto-scalable architecture also enabled Epiqur to eliminate the administrative costs. With building their architecture on AWS Cloud from the ground up, they have implemented a cost structure that is at least four times lower than it would have been in an on-premise environment.

In addition to the financial benefits, Epiqur also achieved strategic advantages of operating in the cloud as they gained competitive edge through speed and innovation. They experienced a huge advantage on Time to Market through the fast and reliable architecture and service implementations on AWS Cloud. That way they had 100% uptime in the last 12 months of operation as well, which is one of their key success metrics.

Next Steps

Epiqur continues to work with Sufle while managing their infrastructure. Sufle offers consulting services and architecture design improvements to Epiqur team when they need to implement a new service or make changes on their environments as new market needs emerge.

If you have such challenges and need help from a solid team to step up your business, Book an Appointment Now and let us bring our high quality consultancy services into your business.