EmuBands provides a simple-to-use but powerful digital music distribution service for artists and record companies to get their music online through Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and many more of the World’s leading digital music services.
The company is successful and growing, but faced the challenge that its existing server platform suffered capacity problems at busy times of the month.
EmuBands’ core application is based on a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) with all server elements running on a dedicated server, held with a traditional hosting company. This server could not easily be upgraded to increase capacity without effectively replacing it with a newer model. Involving significant time and money to carry out this transition, it could not be guaranteed that the company would soon find that continued growth had outstripped the capacity of the new server.
Broadband Cloud Solutions recommended migrating the existing platform to Amazon Web Services to take advantage of flexible capacity management. Servers and databases can be scaled up or down at will, meaning that when the business sees spikes in demand, additional capacity can easily be added to cover these periods then reduced again to manage cost.
The company’s main application was migrated to a modern virtual machine running AWS in London, while the database behind the application was placed in Amazon’s managed Aurora database service, which can be scaled up or down on demand. Security has been a consideration throughout the design and all modern thinking has been addressed – data is encrypted at rest and in transit throughout the new design while the server is protected by several lines of defence using Amazon network security.
In addition to the simple migration, a regime of backups of each element of the infrastructure was put in place using Amazon’s backup tools which allow for prompt recovery of the entire infrastructure in the event of disaster.
With the improvements in place the company can now accelerate the rollout of planned upgrades to its main application using the microservices of AWS Lambda, AWS S3 and AWS SES. The breadth and flexibility of AWS services has caught the imagination of the organisation’s developers; watch carefully for new features arriving soon.
