The goal

Dalmia's business goal is to be in the top two in all its businesses through the strength of its people and the speed of its innovation. To achieve this goal on an innovation front, they want to centralize their IT infrastructure, modernize their applications, and reduce costs, including license costs. They also want to transform their applications and make them future-ready in order to accelerate innovation.

The solution

As an AWS Premier Partner, Minfy brings a range of deep expertise in cloud migration and infrastructure management, adhering to AWS best practices, built upon its proven experience. Minfy believes that clients can migrate and run their HANA and MySQL databases on the AWS Cloud, taking full advantage of its agility.

AWS Services Used:

EC2, RDS, S3, VPC, CloudWatch, Security HUB, Cloud Endure and Launch Wizard

Managed Services solutions

Minfy's Managed Services were instrumental in Dalmia's successful digital transformation journey, offering comprehensive support including:

1. Expert AWS infrastructure management
2. Efficient database management and monitoring for MySQL and MSSQL
3. Reliable backup monitoring and management through Commvault
4. Proactive disaster recovery management and support
5. Comprehensive operating system level support
6. Monitoring and optimization of non-SAP applications, such as Dotnet, IIS, and PHP
7. Cost optimization and capacity planning assistance.

Being India’s largest entertainment platform offering not just tickets for movies, plays, concerts, stand-up comedy and sporting events but also complete execution of live experiences, BookMyShow has contributed immensely to not just the Indian but also global Entertainment ecosystem. They have paved the way for other entertainment service providers by being the first to digitize their offerings through an online ticketing service platform which was how BookMyShow first began. The platform also provides full stack and end-to-end management services for all forms of movies and live events including hospitality, on-ground execution, ingress management & marketing outreach for both partners and consumers to experience the best-in-class entertainment be it out-of-home as it was traditionally or virtual, with offerings delivered safely to consumers’ homes via a virtual streaming experience, thereby covering the entertainment landscape in its entirety.

BookMyShow sells more that 200 million tickets on an annual run rate, which is the largest volume for an online entertainment platform in India. They also approximately get over 200 million monthly customer visits and 5 billion monthly page views on an average. This is a testament to their ability to innovate, respond, be sensitive & agile to changes in Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, and proactively engage with the future. Thus, BookMyShow has done what many organisations fail to do, that is, to consistently stay relevant in their business space.

Here are 2 record-breaking metrics to acknowledge:

• January 2020 created history with the highest number of tickets ever sold at 23 million, for the first time on the platform
• BMS sold 2.1 million movie tickets for a single day on January 12, 2020, the highest ever sold in one day along with 7 consecutive days of 1 million tickets sold each day from January 10th until January 16th, 2020

Pattern of Typical Consumer Usage Traffic Surge Pre-Pandemic:

• Weekends have more traffic for ticket bookings as opposed to weekdays.
• New blockbusters releases spawn traffic surges, which typically happen every couple of weeks to sometimes months during regular release periods.
• Extremely high demand live entertainment events like music concerts, comedy stand-ups, theatrical performances, etc usually occur a few times a year.

As the pandemic hit and a nation-wide lockdown was imposed, BookMyShow was quick to sense the shift in tide and change tack to alter their service portfolio that had catered to out-of-home entertainment for the longest time to enable consumers to find virtual entertainment offerings on their favourite platform. This meant the company’s technology infrastructure was to urgently adapt, accommodate and respond to the ambiguity of the on-going environment. BookMyShow saw a window of opportunity to implement & accelerate their digital transformation in the pandemic. BookMyShow’s many agile transformations through the years to stay strong, resilient and relevant in the face of multiple external downturns has been largely due to a robust technology and product platform built adeptly over several years. 

With the pandemic presenting the opportunity to shift to a smoother digital infrastructure, BookMyShow was looking to further improve their system & process level efficiencies, reduce operational costs significantly, while continuing to remain agile & nimble. This would aid their journey towards being further future-ready while having robust practices & resilient operations all achieved during a period of reduced customer activity.

Thus, adopting the Cloud-based system posed many benefits that would accrue to BookMyShow. A cloud environment enabled BookMyShow to focus its energies & resources on building offerings that provide the ultimate seamless experience for customers. Secondly, the ability to leverage AWS Cloud Services like Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, etc, would help accelerate innovation for both core and emerging offerings. Further, the adoption of new technologies helps BookMyShow attract & retain critical talent across functions within the organisation while aiding decision making far more cost effective in the long run, with little need for capital expenditure to buy & maintain infrastructure and elastic operational expenditure thanks to the Pay-as-you-go Model (likening it to a Light Switch).

The entire Cloud Migration Process consist of two phases:

• Phase 1: Rehost – Lift & Shift BMS Site & Services to AWS Cloud (Completed)
• Phase 2: Refactor – Optimize & Adopt Cloud Native Technologies (On-Going)

BookMyShow has always prided itself on rapid time-to-market, a major prerequisite to being a successful organization in the entertainment business space. Therefore, the @minfyteam leveraged infrastructure as a code (IaaC), which served purposefully due to its ability to turn complex systems and environments into a few lines of code, deploying them at a click of a button.

Perhaps a major point of interest is how BookMyShow decided to leverage Gravtion2 for production workloads. It gave us a significant opportunity to improve the price-performance profile of some of the major database workloads that we currently run-on Amazon EC2. We scheduled the start and stop to run in the business hours, and calculated cost projections monthly to realize the savings achieved during the migration period. Therefore, having benchmarked the new Graviton2-based R6g and C6g instances, we have potentially lowered costs by 30% compared to similar workloads on other instances. We take this as a major lesson learned during this transformation journey. 

Requirement

The priority areas are increasing billing efficiency and enhancing customer satisfaction by focusing on reducing daily operational challenges via implementation of a centralized billing and metering system in a cloud environment.

UPPCL has 35+ applications developed by different SIs before this RFP, all these applications were either hosted in UPPCL on prem DC or any third part DC of SI’s choice. Now out of these 35 applications, we have migrated more than 25 applications to AWS and all the respective cloud infra on AWS is being managed by Minfy. We are providing PS, RS, and MS services to UPPCL.

Challenges-

• Low revenue-realization due to incorrect billing and lack of collections
• The absence of a centralized billing system
• High capex involved in establishing DC/DR etc
• Increasing consumer complaints regarding thefts and pilferage
• High losses due to low billing and collection inefficiency

Benefits

• Increased billing and collection efficiency in rural areas
• Reduced AT&C losses owing to better grip on commercial losses
• Fast implementation, leading to quick results and benefits
• No capex, leading to a reduced burden on utility
• Centralization of data and implementation of a common billing system, leading to higher accuracy and efficiency
• More power to consumers by enabling self-service capabilities through web portals and mobile applications
• Better connectivity and communication between utility and consumers through SMS notifications
• More reliable and secured network owing to a cloud-based infrastructure
• Mobile spot billing app integrated with UOC and MWM to improve metering and billing efficiency and arrest revenue leakage.
• Easy and quick bill-generation through spot-billing
• Efficient revenue collection through a self-service mobile application, which includes both trust meter reading and billing

Requirement

Conversational AI

As part of their Digital Transformation Client planning to provide a self-service information and transactional tool for internal and external users using a ChatBot service. That will transform their current business process and ease the payments/customer experience for the distributors and 14800 fully automated fuel stations It should understand natural language queries keyed-in by the user and provide the information requested or process a transaction on behalf of the user.

1. Provide FAQ Knowledge base linked information through easy chat flow.
2. Enhance user experience by integrating with NLP API’s.
3. Process relevant transaction based on user’s input
4. BOT Application to be interfaced with on-premise SAP/.Net applications to perform transactions.

Business Analytics and Data Visualization

Client’s transactional data resides in SAP systems and MS SQL/Oracle/PostgreSQL databases. On-premise SAP Business Warehouse is being used as the corporate data warehouse. The data stored across all these systems is to be made available for analysis using a Business Analytics and Data Visualization tool. It should enable creations of analytical artefacts like reports, dashboards, KPIs and so on and also allow easy access to these components to the end users for consumption.

1. Analytical reports and dashboards based on data stored in both on- premise as well as cloud based systems.
2. Broadcasting reports to end users through emails(including attachment capabilities)
3. To integrate with multiple data sources including on premise SAP- BI Hana server.

Solution

AI-Architecture

Minfy has proposed to build the AI Conversational bot leveraging a partner solution MY-ASSIT a low code platform to build the chatbot, the solution has NLP capabilities:

· Assistant uses Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Advanced Dialog management, and Machine Learning (ML) to understand, react and learn from every interaction.
· Facilitates conversations between a customer and a business, and within the business to automate operations.

Minfy builds the conversational AI leveraging below AWS native services :
1. AWS Cognito
2. AWS Sagemaker.
3. API Gateway
4. AWS Lamda
5. Elasticsearch
6. AWS Fargate
7. AWS Comprehend

Benefits

- Myassit - Low Code Chatbot development platform helped to develop the solution in 5X lesser time of native development.- AI --- - Models had been created with the help of the past 15 years of data provided by the customer and these models can be re-trained with ease with help of the customization framework available in Myassist.
- The customer could leverage AWS for the acceleration of their innovation without any hassle in a hybrid approach
- AWS Fargate helps to scale the infrastructure no worries of provisioning and deprovisioning of the infrastructure
- QuickSight helped to embed interactive dashboards into client applications, websites, and portals with its serverless architecture that automatically scales to tens of thousands of users in pay as you go model.

Challenge

As a part of the Digital India initiative Bihar state examination board has developed an online university collaboration platform that allows students to apply for multiple graduate colleges admission, application status tracking & admission status and results tracking as well, all in single click.

Core Problems stated by the State Education Board & Universities were:

1. Frequent downtimes during load on their on premise hosting.
2. Unable to match access spikes on physical DC set-up.
3. Unable to scale database for shorter duration due to licensing issues and hardware unavailability.
4. Uneven traffic as the portal usage will be high only during admissions & results, infrastructure agility is the most imperative component on the expected solutions – Scaling up more servers during admissions & scaling down after
the admissions are over.

With High profile public-sector involvement and impact on the exam results/data provided to be showcased on this platform, which has high media vicinity, the unpredictable nature of the viewer count, including the high data volume, the challenge put across the team was to come up with a solution covering all aspects of scalability.

The view count was expected to be in hundreds per second with a target audience of 30 Million students. The application should be able to withstand such a load without any downtime. Since there is payment transaction is also involved there could not have been a downtime for even a few seconds.

Solution

Minfy’ s Enterprise Cloud Architects worked with the Infrastructure team of the customer to migrate their website on AWS paying special attention of cost, scalability & security.
The proposed solution will enable them to scale from a minimal set of users to thousands at any given time. To accomplish this requirement, the solution was implemented using services such as AWS Autoscale, AWS EC2, AWS Elastic Load balancer and AWS S3.
● A highly scalable and available web architecture was proposed on AWS for this workload.
● Application was designed using .Net by an ISV partner with ALB, Active Directory and Multiple Application Servers for modules.
● AWS Auto Scaling will manage un Healthy EC2instances. AWS AutoScaling will ensure minimum number app& dev EC2 instances are always running ,In event of failure , new instances will be launched between 30-120 seconds automatically .
● To ensure on high availability the image of the application server has been launched in another availability zone to make sure the
application availability if any disaster strikes i.e if the primary Availability Zone goes down.

Benefit

1. Serverscould handle a consistent load of over25000 sessions without any downtime.
2. During the last two days before the deadline for the application for admissions the load increased multi-folds. Additional base servers were launched to address those workloads.
3. Compared to the previous year where in there were frequent down times, this year experienced none.
4. Application performance was maintained as Core and RAM usage was maintained below 75% due to Auto Scale.
6. Additional compute could be provisioned on the database as well during the last few days of registration
7. More or less all the users who had applied to various colleges on the platform logged in on a single day within the first hour to check for results asity got declared.

Challenge

iQuippo was using costly on-premises infrastructure which needed to be regularly upgraded to match the surge in demand as the digital marketplace concept gained traction within the construction industry. Moreover, as the portal evolved, developers at the company were regularly releasing new builds almost weekly with new features and solutions. But they did not have sturdy release mechanisms or automated roll-back plans in place. Often, site users would experience bug- and human error-related issues and portal downtime.

Information security was also a concern, as iQuippo offered financing solutions through its tie-ups with banks and financial institutions. The portal had to meet the stringent financial data security requirements of the Reserve Bank of India. As part of an early initiative to reduce capital expenditure and address data security issues, iQuippo had decided to host its Disaster Recovery (DR) mechanisms on the cloud.

It approached Minfy, an AWS managed services specialist to help it do this. Later, as the benefits of cloud hosting became apparent, the scope of services increased to include architecting a comprehensive cloud solution for the core iQuippo application as well. To tackle the issues of bugs arising due to insufficiently streamlined development and release cycles, Minfy was also asked to help with end-to-end automation of the company’s software development processes which would follow DevOps best practices.

Solution

To tackle these challenges, Minfy, an AWS managed-services specialist, developed a robust and secure, DevOps compliant, AWS cloud-hosted infrastructure architecture. The high-level diagrams below provide an overview of the three-tiered application stack. Under the new scheme, the core iQuippo website application frontend uses Nginx webserver running on an Amazon Linux server with a backend MongoDB database. This setup would not require any build or deployment on the webservers as Nginx can also works as a reverse proxy server.

For the iQuippo backend, the app node is developed using JavaS-cript and the source code repository is maintained through AWS Code Commit. The source code is automatically built using Grunt on AWS CodeBuild, and deployed on AWS EC2 instances running in a virtual private cloud (VPC) using AWS CodeDeploy. The application architecture also includes Amazon Route 53, Amazon S3, and Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS IAM.

Benefit

The iQuippo marketplace now operates far more reliably and with zero downtime deployments. Because of the stability and excellent security features available on the portal, users can conduct large financial transactions without concern. Through hosting the portal on the AWS cloud, the portal is reaping the benefits of infrastructure and cost optimization, proactive monitoring, and continuous delivery.

The Minfy team continues to provide support through monitoring, detecting events, analysing and resolving issues, providing root cause analysis, and deploying needed changes. As iQuippo scales further, deploys even more innovative schemes and features, and expands into newer geographies, its reliable cloud-enabled infrastructure is enabling

Results

Minfy’s implementation of the DevOps compliant cloud architecture is now helping Trans Neuron developers meet their targets and deadlines. Software building and deployment processes that were earlier haphazard, are now greased to perfection, and the platform is seeing zero downtime. This has better-positioned the company to focus on innovation and creativity, and the speedy release of ever more useful functionality. An increasing number of students, academic institutions, and enterprises across the country are benefiting from the possibilities unleashed by Trans Neuron’s skilling ecosystem on the cloud. In the background, the Minfy team views the new architecture undergirding the cloud solution as a worthwhile effort towards the skill development of India’s youth.

Challenge

Software & Hardware: Legacy applications were running on outdated hardware that wasn't delivering the performance required.

Operational Expenditure: Operational expenses needed to be reduced, including hardware maintenance costs.

Infrastructure Agility: Government to Citizen applications needed more agility on the infrastructure as traffic will be agile based on schemes.

Multiple IT Vendors: The company had multiple vendors and support contracts resulting in significant management overhead costs.

Solution

Minfy lifted & shifted the 16 critical G2G,G2C and G2B applications to AWS seamlessly, paying special attention to maximizing uptime and ensuring business continuity for all core websites of DIT. They reduced capital and operational costs by avoiding new hardware purchases and redeploying IT staff to projects that directly supported the core business.

Minfy started the cloud adoption journey of Department of IT Manipur with a complete study of their existing IT infrastructure and costs, including recommendations and detailed migration plan With a detailed plan in place, Minfy worked with DIT, Manipur to migrate their applications to AWS, including the 16 critical G2G, G2C and G2B applications.

Benefits

• Ability to start and stop non-production services on-demand to reduce operational costs

• Ability to run legacy applications independent of hardware or operating system restrictions by utilizing Amazon Machine Images (AMI)

• Ability to consolidate critical G2G, G2C andG2B applications to AWS with no business interruptions by leveraging the centralized AWS computing platform

Challenge

Being a leading public-school , the traffic to the website during the admission period which is from January to March of every year has been very high & unpredictable even resulted in crashing of the website.

Solution

Minfy's Implementation team along with the Cloud architects worked with Infrastructure team & business stakeholders from the customer’s end to derive out the migration plan to ensure on zero / very minimal interruption to the website’s availability.
● Applications were moved in a manual lift and shift approach.
● According to customer's solution architecture, server size, OS and
RAM the Infrastructure on cloud was designed and deployed.

Benefits

• Agility in the infrastructure
• Performance at Scale
• Faster Innovation
• High Availability
• Security

Challenge

Since the business model deals with the storage of large amounts of structured and unstructured data in the form of documents, images and videos for analytics purpose, reliability, availability, and durability along with cost becomes a major challenge. Another challenge was accidental deletion of data with less or no option for retrieval.

Shore Group also wished to overhaul their existing document repository and discovery product to meet the growing market expectations related to search and performance.

Solution

1. Set up file management and content processing engine based on the Serverless Application Modelling Architecture of AWS
2. AWS DynamoDB has been configured to manage the workflow entities
3. AWS SQS has been configured to ensure parallel processing of file movement from one bucket to another and to extract content from each file
4. AWS Elasticsearch has been configured to allow a full-text search of the document
5. We used the S3versioning to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored.

-SAP Solutions Manager 7.2 is to be Installed at AWS.

Benefits

Shore has adapted AWS to resolve existing challenges, also achieving durability of 11 9’s and availability of 99.9% through it. S3 versioning was leveraged to ensure data was never lost even if it is accidentally deleted.

The need to have SAN, NAS infrastructure for redundant backup storage and infrastructure was no longer necessary as buckets could be replicated. EBS based solution with EC2 instance running watcher functions was not an ideal solution for shore group as it did not ensure security or reliability.

Nodes with watcher functions on EC2 instances to watch for files to be processed were replaced with SQS along with the logic of processing of the input jobs automatically using Lambda. This has enabled shore to go serverless reducing overheads of SLA and increasing performance.

Data breach threat was solved by using Server Side Encryption and Key Management Service – KMS-SSE combination to protect S3 buckets.