Case Study: CDN Migration from Akamai to Amazon CloudFront

Challenge

A global leader in advertising technology needed to migrate its content delivery network (CDN) from Akamai to Amazon CloudFront while maintaining comprehensive analytics capabilities. The client required a solution that could efficiently handle massive data volumes, processing and analyzing terabytes of data monthly. Additionally, it was crucial to track various metrics such as total traffic, asset type distribution, and detailed video performance to optimize content delivery. 

Ensuring scalability and cost-effectiveness was a priority, as the solution needed to support both historical and near real-time analytics. The project aimed to create a robust architecture that could adapt to evolving business needs.

Implementation

Akamai configurations were successfully migrated to Amazon CloudFront, ensuring a smooth transition with minimal disruption. 

A comprehensive Amazon QuickSight dashboard was developed to replicate the functionalities of the Akamai dashboard, providing essential metrics such as overall traffic, asset type distribution, and video performance details. 

Data processing and storage solutions were implemented using Amazon S3, AWS Glue, and Amazon Athena, handling large volumes of data efficiently. AWS Step Functions and Amazon EventBridge were utilized for orchestration, ensuring seamless data processing and error handling. The solution was designed with scalability in mind, enabling it to handle growing data volumes and future enhancements.

Additional datastore components were incorporated to support more specialized analytics requirements. Amazon OpenSearch Service was used to index and query high-volume log data for faster operational insights, while Amazon RDS handled structured relational datasets that required consistent transactional access.

Outcome

The migration to Amazon CloudFront and the implementation of the analytics dashboard resulted in improved content delivery and insightful metrics tracking. The client now benefits from a robust, scalable solution that processes and analyzes terabytes of data monthly. 

The QuickSight dashboard allows stakeholders to easily access key performance metrics, driving data-driven decisions and optimizations. The new architecture also offers cost savings and better resource allocation through efficient data processing and storage strategies. Future enhancements, including real-time analytics and machine learning integration, are planned to further enhance the platform's capabilities. Metrics

• Processed terabytes of CloudFront log data monthly.
• Achieved data query performance improvements by up to 30% through optimized partitioning.
• Reduced data processing time by more than 40% using AWS Glue jobs.
• Enabled near real-time analytics with data refresh rates as frequent as every 6 hours.
• Improved video metadata extraction efficiency by up to 25% using AWS Lambda functions.