The document outlines the collaboration between Microgroove and GoGrid to develop a high-performance cloud environment optimized for the music industry, enabling rapid deployment and efficient management of extensive content for major recording artists. Microgroove transitioned from self-hosting to GoGrid's infrastructure, resulting in increased scalability, reduced onboarding time for new customers, and enhanced performance metrics. Key takeaways include maintaining dedicated hardware for predictable performance and avoiding unnecessary re-architecture when moving to the cloud.

1. Performance Matters, Especially in the Music Industry
Microgroove & GoGrid
How to create a
high-performance,
cost-effective
cloud environment
Brett Nagy (Technical Director – Microgroove)
Michael Sheehan (Technology Evangelist – GoGrid)

2. Introductions
 Brett Nagy
• Technical Director – Microgroove
 Michael Sheehan
• Technology Evangelist – GoGrid
2 February 2012

3. About GoGrid – A leader in the IaaS Market
“Visionary”
 Leading IaaS provider Magic Quadrant
 Strong Track Record of “First-To-Market”
Features “Champion”
Quadrant
 World-class platform for infrastructure
management “Market Leader”
 Thousands of Customers Across All Industries
“10 Cloud
 GoGrid outperforms competition by over 4 x Computing
in third-party benchmarking tests Companies to
Watch”
 GoGrid owns 100% of its IP “Top 10 Best Cloud
Computing Providers”
3 February 2012
3

4. Microgroove – A Platform for the music industry
Microgroove-developed software is currently deployed on hundreds of high-traffic
web sites, transacting content, community and dollars, every moment.
Over 500 Major Recording Artists Powering the World’s Biggest Record Labels
4 February 2012

5. Millions of Content Items
 Over 100,000 Artists
 1.5 Million Tracks
 50,000 Tour Dates
 Millions of Members
 Millions of Posts
 Meta Data support
from Bach to Lady Gaga
5 February 2012

6. Billions of Data Transactions
 By Millions of Active U/U’s
 Direct to Consumer Sales
 White Label Stores
 Media Views
 Social Networking
 Ad Integrations
 International Presence
6 February 2012

7. Microgroove Ecosystem
 Licensable CMS platform,
built for the music industry
 Developer Community: SDK
& API
 Mobile: Native + Web Apps
 Content Syndication &
Affiliates
7 February 2012

8. Microgroove Technology
Challenge
Why the cloud?
What was the challenge?
8 February 2012

9. The Need to Grow & Evolve
 Reduce time to on-board new
customers
 Direct access to our own software
 No data center environment
 Needed Management and Support
requirements
• Needed SLA & Dependable 24x7
Support team
 Ability to Stage environments
9

10. Long Distance “Management” Challenge
Servers
hosted &
managed
Audience No All
HERE direct
located access
Managed
HERE HERE
10 February 2012

11. Challenges
 Rapid deployment – needed to roll out a new version of the Microgroove Platform every 4
weeks
 IT Staff utilization- Did not want to hire NEW staff to sit and watch servers
 Burstable traffic
 Two specific customer challenges
• Hosting & Managing large number of individual artist websites
• Hosting GetMusic.com.au (music portal)
TOO
MUCH
MANAGEMENT!
Microgroove HQ
11 February 2012

12. Going Cloud
What was the challenge?
What was the research?
What was the technical solution?
What were the results?
What lessons were learned?
12 February 2012

13. What was the technical challenge?
 What Microgroove was trying to accomplish:
• Deliver the Microgroove Platform as a PaaS
• Not worry about hardware or data center management
• Serve international markets
 Technical Details:
• Strong Windows support
• Avoid re-architecting the Microgroove Platform
• Needed a high-performance solution for data intensive transactions
• Scale-up and down easily
13 February 2012

14. What was the research?
 Started search Q4 of 2009
 7 years of self-hosting & supporting other
people’s hosting = hands on experience
 Some experience in co-location hosting
 Wasn't looking for a "cloud provider" - just
wanted "easy to manage”
 Initial research focused on management
consoles, not service providers
14 February 2012

15. Short List Results – Narrowed to 2 Providers
 Provider #1  GoGrid
 Completely virtualized  Hybrid environment
environment means shared  1st-class Windows Support
hardware
 Physical servers for high I/O data
 Competing Read/Writes transactions
 Cost structure optimized for  Virtual servers for scalability
bursts of compute time
 CDN for media delivery across the
 Windows images not as current as globe
Linux images
 Cost : Performance ratio was good
 Windows pricing more expensive
 Persistent server images & attached
than Linux
data
15 February 2012

16. GoGrid Enabled Microgroove Platform
Microgroove HQ
Microgroove HQ
16 February 2012

17. 17 February 2012

18. Technical Diagram
18 February 2012

19. Architecture Details
PRODUCTION STAGING
 NGINX Load Balancing Tier  Staging Servers
• Cloud-based single-core servers (scalable) • Upload point for SDK-based sites
• CentOS 5.3
• Connects to production databases
• Also serves images from Cloud Storage
• Doubles as application servers
 Web Servers
• Cloud-based 8-core servers (scalable)  Document Database Servers
• Windows 2008 / IIS 7 • “NoSQL” DB Servers
• Uses Raven DB + Map/Reduce
 Database Servers • Currently used for specific reporting tasks
• Dedicated 8-core servers
• MS SQL Servers for 100+ sites
 Cloud Storage
• All CMS-uploaded static assets
• Accessed via UNC paths
 Content Delivery Network
• Images and other static files
• Pulled from Cloud Storage
19 February 2012

20. Why were these choices made?
 Cloud Servers
• Deployed to separate hardware nodes
• Persistent storage
• Scalability via MyGSI  server imaging to facilitate rollout of additional servers
 Physical Servers
• Performance & high I/O
 NGINX
• Highly configurable reverse proxy
• Failover for redundancy
 Cloud Storage
• Repository of product and artist images
 CDN
• Delivery of content over 7500 miles with multiple PoPs
 Firewall
• Direct, private connectivity via VPN from Microgroove to GoGrid infrastructure
20 February 2012

21. Long Distance Content – SOLVED!
Audience Infrastructure All
located CDN located Managed
HERE At HERE
GoGrid
21 February 2012

22. What were the results?
 Went from hosting 3 sites to over 100 sites
 On-boarding new customers in hours instead of weeks
 400% reduction in page load times
 Direct access to own software  more freedom to innovate
 Ongoing performance tuning is easier  do more of it now
22 February 2012

23. What lessons were learned?
 Windows is Windows, wherever it’s hosted
 Scale-out still needs to be planned-out
 Dedicated hardware = predictable performance
23 February 2012

24. Future
What are the plans for the future?
What are the key takeaways?
How to craft your Cloud Fingerprint
24 February 2012

25. What are Microgroove’s plans for the future?
 Multi-data center failover
 Auto-scaling – using metrics from monitoring API
 Completely automating new customer provisioning
25 February 2012

26. What are the key takeaways?
Moving to the cloud doesn’t have to mean
re-architecting existing software
Don’t throw out the dedicated hardware just yet
26 February 2012

27. Contact & Customer Case Study Download
GoGrid Contact Information: Download the Full Case Study
www.GoGrid.com To download the Microgroove Case Study,
Telephone - 1-877-946-4743 please click here:
International - +1(415) 869-7444 http://go.gogrid.com/case-study/microgroove
Twitter - @GoGrid
Facebook – Facebook.com/gogrid
LinkedIn - LinkedIn.com/company/gogrid
Note: you must have Adobe Acrobat installed to view the Case
Study
27 February 2012