CIVICPLUS CASE STUDY

Media Streaming Solutions with AWS Elemental
Services

Challenges

Inefficient Infrastructure: High costs and poor scalability of existing Wowza engines.
Limited Scalability: Issues with Wowza engine’s Azure cloud integration.
Unreliable Streaming Service: Difficulty providing reliable and affordable live-streaming services.

Benefits

Cost & Efficiency: Significant savings and increased efficiency using AWS Serverless services and CloudFormation.
Security & Scalability: Enhanced stream security and adaptable infrastructure with IP CIDR whitelisting and AWS services.
User Experience: Improved recognition of customer-specific content with unique domain names.

Executive Summary

CivicPlus, a digital solutions provider to over 12,000 customers across the US and Canada, faced challenges with its live streaming capability due to high costs and limited scalability with Wowza engines. Partnering with Futuralis, they developed a solution using AWS Elemental Services to overcome these problems. The result is a scalable, cost-effective media infrastructure that enhances community engagement and civic participation.

The Challenge

CivicPlus encountered significant hurdles with its media infrastructure, especially regarding the high costs and limited scalability of Wowza engines for live streaming. These issues posed risks to the company's ability to reliably and affordably provide live streaming services, impeding last-minute event hosting for a multitude of clients. Moreover, integration problems with the Wowza engine's Azure cloud affected its operational capacity and scalability, necessitating a more flexible and effective media infrastructure solution

Why Futuralis & AWS

Futuralis, with their extensive expertise and experience in cloud architecture, was a perfect fit for CivicPlus' challenges. Their proven track record in providing custom solutions, along with their deep understanding of AWS services, made them the ideal partner. Futuralis' dedication to addressing CivicPlus' unique challenges head-on and their commitment to deploying a scalable and affordable solution was instrumental in their selection.

Our Solution

Futuralis developed a Live-Streaming & VOD file solution employing AWS Elemental Services, including MediaLive, MediaPackage, and MediaConvert. They adopted AWS Serverless services for backend operations to curtail costs and boost efficiency. CloudFormation was used to orchestrate AWS resources consistently and reliably, ensuring a smooth and error-free deployment.

Futuralis' solution offered CivicPlus the flexibility to manage customer meetings efficiently and implement a live-streaming pipeline with ease. A key feature was the ability to play static content when the live stream was paused. The solution also allowed the whitelisting of IP CIDRs to ensure secure stream delivery to MediaLive and supported Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) for accessing the APIs from any domain.

Moreover, it enabled CivicPlus to replace the live-stream CDN URL and VOD file URL with a unique custom domain name, simplifying customer-specific content identification.

Results & Benefits

Enhanced Security and Scalability
By enabling IP CIDR whitelisting, the solution ensured secure stream delivery to MediaLive, reducing potential risks. The AWS Elemental Services and Serverless services provided a scalable infrastructure that readily accommodated last-minute events, demonstrating adaptability and effectiveness.

Cost and Efficiency Improvements
The use of AWS Serverless services for the backend and CloudFormation for resource distribution led to significant cost savings and improved efficiency for CivicPlus. This made it easier to manage customer additions and meetings.

Improved User Experience
CivicPlus was able to replace the generic live-stream-CDN URL and VOD file URL with unique, customer-specific domain names, simplifying user recognition of specific content and enhancing the overall user experience.

About Civicplus

CivicPlus operates in the realm of digital solutions, providing an extensive range of services to more than 12,000 customers in the United States and Canada. Their mission is to empower positive resident-government interactions. They aim to counter the perception of local government operations as inefficient by creating innovative technology that powers and empowers these interactions.

About Futuralis

Migrate – Modernize – Manage

Futuralis is a global tech consulting firm and AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner based in Washington, DC. We specialize in migrating complex workloads to AWS, modernizing them into fast, enterprise-grade solutions, and providing top-tier cloud management. Our ethos of Shared Business Excellence guides our pursuit of client capability enhancement, global customer satisfaction, and measurable results.

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