Animation Digital Network (ADN), a leading anime streaming platform in France, sought to modernize its infrastructure to sustain rapid subscriber growth, expand internationally, and reduce the complexity of managing on-premises systems. Preparing for entry into the German market, ADN partnered with TrackIt to re-architect its environment on AWS. The transformation introduced a cloud-native foundation that unified microservices orchestration, centralized data analytics, and optimized global content delivery.
Contents
🗺️ The Migration Journey
ADN leveraged the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) to ensure a smooth and efficient transition to AWS. The program provided a structured approach to modernization, enabling ADN to plan, execute, and streamline its migration with reduced risk and greater predictability.
The journey followed the three phases of the MAP framework, each addressing a critical step in ADN’s transformation:
- Assessment Phase – Conducted a deep audit of workloads, streaming architecture, and content delivery, pinpointing scaling limits, operational risks, and areas where latency affected user experience.
- Mobilize Phase – Developed a future-ready architecture using Kubernetes for microservices orchestration, an optimized data lake for metadata handling, and enhanced edge delivery to improve playback quality and reduce buffering.
- Migrate & Modernize Phase – Carried out the migration with parallel modernization of data and applications, implementing automation, observability, and failover strategies to keep downtime to a minimum.
🛠 Migrating Microservices to Amazon EKS
ADN’s legacy deployment approach was functional but increasingly complex to maintain, especially with the growing number of microservices that powered streaming, content management, and user-facing features.
- Move to Kubernetes: Moving to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) provided a fully managed control plane, reducing ADN’s operational overhead while retaining flexibility in workload orchestration.
- Scaling considerations: ADN’s traffic patterns are highly variable, with spikes during popular series launches and seasonal events. Karpenter was introduced to automate scaling, provisioning compute nodes in response to load while optimizing for cost.
- Deployment standardization: With Helm charts, ADN standardized microservice deployments, ensuring consistent configuration across environments.
- Observability improvements: Integrating Prometheus and Grafana provided unified, real-time visibility into service health, allowing the team to detect and address issues before they impacted viewers.
The EKS migration not only improved ADN’s agility but also set the foundation for faster feature rollouts and more stable streaming sessions.
📊 Building a Centralized Data Lake
One of the strategic goals under the MAP framework was to enable ADN to leverage its growing datasets for better decision-making. Prior to the migration, data was siloed across multiple systems, limiting the scope of analytics.
- Data unification: The team designed a centralized data lake on Amazon S3, serving as the single source of truth for structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
- ETL pipeline considerations: Using AWS Glue and Amazon Athena, data from multiple ingestion sources—application logs, user behavior metrics, and content metadata—was transformed and made query-ready without requiring complex infrastructure management.
- Security & governance: IAM policies and AWS Lake Formation ensured secure access control and compliance with GDPR requirements, which are critical for handling subscriber data in the EU.
- Business enablement: The data lake empowered ADN’s analytics teams to identify viewer trends, measure campaign effectiveness, and even inform content licensing decisions based on real audience data rather than assumptions.
This analytics backbone positioned ADN to make data-driven decisions quickly, a key advantage in the competitive streaming market.
🌐Optimizing Content Delivery with Amazon CloudFront
Streaming is only as good as the delivery experience, and ADN’s previous setup relied on a self-managed CDN hosted on OVH, which does not provide a managed CDN offering. This approach created additional maintenance workloads for ADN’s engineering team, leaving less time to innovate. During high-traffic moments, the configuration often struggled to keep up. Optimizing this layer was crucial for both user satisfaction and freeing resources to focus on growth.
- Edge performance: Deploying Amazon CloudFront brought content closer to viewers via AWS’s global edge network, reducing latency and buffering during peak hours.
- Caching strategy: A tailored caching policy ensured that frequently accessed episodes and previews were served instantly, while dynamic API requests were directed to the origin without unnecessary delays.
- Cost and origin protection: Origin Shield and intelligent cache invalidation reduced load on ADN’s origin servers, helping control bandwidth costs while preserving stability.
- Security integration: AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) was integrated at the edge to protect against common web exploits and DDoS attempts, safeguarding uptime during high-profile releases.
This CDN optimization meant that fans could enjoy uninterrupted viewing experiences—even when entire seasons dropped at once.
🏆 Outcomes – The Business Impact for ADN
Through the MAP-driven modernization effort, ADN achieved:
📈 Scalability – Migrating to a Kubernetes-based microservices architecture enabled ADN to dynamically scale resources up or down in response to viewer demand. This was particularly critical during new episode releases, when traffic surged significantly. The elastic infrastructure ensured uninterrupted access for users even under peak loads.
⚡ Performance – By optimizing containerized workloads and integrating edge delivery enhancements, the platform achieved reduced video start times and improved stream stability. Viewers experienced smoother playback with fewer buffering interruptions, directly contributing to higher engagement and retention.
💰 Cost Efficiency – Intelligent autoscaling through Karpenter and workload right-sizing prevented over-provisioning, while optimized content delivery lowered data transfer costs. This combination provided ADN with a leaner, more predictable cost model without compromising service quality.
🔍 Data-Driven Decisions – Enhanced observability with Grafana and faster analytics pipelines empowered ADN to quickly identify viewing trends, content performance metrics, and operational bottlenecks. These insights supported more agile decision-making in both content acquisition and targeted marketing campaigns.
🌍 Business Growth – The modernization effort not only improved technology foundations but also enabled ADN to pursue its broader business goals. With a more reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient platform, ADN successfully launched operations in Germany, expanding its reach to new audiences and strengthening its position as a leading anime streaming service in Europe.
Conclusion
ADN’s modernization journey resulted in a cloud-native infrastructure built for scalability and resilience. The transformation delivered performance, cost efficiency, and operational agility—equipping the platform to adapt rapidly to evolving audience behaviors, release schedules, and content strategies.
| “Working with TrackIt felt like having an extension of our own team. They understood our challenges from day one and guided us through every step of our migration. The improvements in scalability, cost efficiency, and observability have been game-changing for us. We no longer worry about resource limitations or unexpected costs—everything just works. TrackIt’s expertise and hands-on approach made all the difference.” – Alan Corbel, CTO, ADN |
About TrackIt
TrackIt is an international AWS cloud consulting, systems integration, and software development firm headquartered in Marina del Rey, CA.
We have built our reputation on helping media companies architect and implement cost-effective, reliable, and scalable Media & Entertainment workflows in the cloud. These include streaming and on-demand video solutions, media asset management, and archiving, incorporating the latest AI technology to build bespoke media solutions tailored to customer requirements.
Cloud-native software development is at the foundation of what we do. We specialize in Application Modernization, Containerization, Infrastructure as Code and event-driven serverless architectures by leveraging the latest AWS services. Along with our Managed Services offerings which provide 24/7 cloud infrastructure maintenance and support, we are able to provide complete solutions for the media industry.