Dianomi MCR

Dianomi Plc is an award-winning business that delivers native advertising to premium clients in the Business, Finance and Lifestyle sectors. Dianomi works with a global base of over 400 advertisers and 300 publishers including the Wall Street Journal, BBC, Reuters, and Forbes.

Dianomi’s platform serves more than 8 billion content ads per month reaching a global audience of over 400 million devices.

Customer Challenge

Dianomi’s advertising platform was hosted on Rackspace. Dianomi wanted to migrate their entire platform, which included 20 Centos VMs and MySQL database, to AWS to reduce costs, improve reliability, support, and modernise their DevOps pipeline. All AWS infrastructure was to be deployed and managed via Terraform. Dianomi’s 1Tb MySQL platform database had to be replicated to AWS ensuring all changes were streamed with a maximum lag of 15 seconds. Finally, Dianomi’s customers must not experience any outages or downtime during the migration project.

Proposed Solution

Elixirr Digital worked closely with Dianomi’s team to understand the existing platform architecture and current scaling challenges to propose an architecture that would support the current workload but with flexibility to allow Dianomi to enhance and scale post the migration project. The Rackspace environment would be replicated on a 1:1 basis to ensure seamless functionality of the service within AWS. Elixirr Digital proposed a DEV and PROD environment in separate AWS accounts fully managed and configured via Terraform. Ansible playbooks to configure and automate application deployment. Over 70 alerts and monitors were to be setup in CloudWatch so Elixirr Digital’s support team would be notified of any problems with the system within AWS.

Data Migration

The most challenging aspect of the project was to stream and replicate the MySQL database from Rackspace in UK to the new AWS RDS MySQL database in North Virginia while maintaining a 15 second lag so upon cutover to the new environment Dianomi’s customers wouldn’t experience errors.

Third Party applications and solutions used.

Open source tools myDumper and myLoader were used to take a full database export and AWS DMS was used to replicate live changes. This solution required extensive testing and customization before the optimal configuration was arrived upon. Terraform and Ansible were used to create and configure each environment in AWS.

Successful Migration and Hypercare

After rigorous testing Elixirr Digital successfully migrated Dianomi’s ad platform in March 2023. No errors were reported by any of Dianomi’s customers. Following migration ran our standard 2-week hypercare process where the entire project team monitor the new systems performance and triage any issues that are reported.

AWS Technology Used

Dianomi’s platform used an extensive range of AWS technology to support migrating 20 Virtual Machines from Rackspace to AWS. These included:

• Networking: VPC, Route53
• Compute: EC2, Lambda, ELB, SES, SNS
• Storage: EFS, S3
• Database: RDS, DynamoDB, DMS
• Containers: ECS, ECR
• Security and Identity: Secrets Manager, Cloud Watch, Guard Duty, Cloud Trail

Outcome and Results

Dianomi immediately benefited from a 35% decrease in hosting costs as compared to Rackspace. Following the successful migration, Elixirr Digital have continued to evolve Dianomi’s infrastructure, increasingly focused on moving to a serverless first approach. A rightsizing program across EC2 and RDS resulted in further 10% savings. Elixirr Digital have implemented an automated patching program using AWS Systems Manager ensuring all infrastructure is automatically patched every month without downtime.

The Dianomi team continue to benefit from the flexibility and power offered by AWS and are looking forward to enhancing their platform with ETL Pipelines and Machine Learning algorithms.