JoVE recently reached two milestones: as of 2018, 6 million-plus viewers access JoVE.com annually, and we now stream 10,000-plus videos.
We’re committed to both creating great science video content and providing the best viewer experience possible. This means we must be available 99.99% of the time, even with viewership spikes, which are frequently unpredictable. So over the past year, we decided to scale out our delivery capacities through a major cloud-based data center migration.
Simultaneously, our information technology team is constantly developing new applications and features for our subscribers. All our systems and assets must be working well internally — leaving us little time for daily IT housekeeping (such as routine patches and upgrades).
Turning to Cloud Power
So, for the migration we selected a top-notch partner, Mission, and went live on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. JoVE now leverages two robust data centers, one in the United States and another in Asia.
This new cloud system meets our growing global needs for application performance and deployment speed. Additionally, our viewers access the data center nearest to their location, which ensures rapid content delivery and the consistency of the JoVE experience.
As part of the upgrade, we (and our viewers) now benefit from all sorts of cutting-edge IT performance and maintenance solutions, including auto-scaling, high-availability failover, log monitoring, and more. And all our interactions are protected by AWS Web Application Firewall to make sure subscriber data is secure. This supports our security compliance and offers you ironclad protection from hackers seeking to access your private information.
JoVE: It’s About You
As part of this project, our partner showed us how to optimize AWS’ resources and even further reduce our IT costs. The various storage, database, and other monitoring and management tools enable us to do more with the same personnel. In fact, the migration has cut our monthly IT spend by half.
Viewing spikes? Not a problem. Our new state-of-the-art system can handle our growth without sacrificing quality — for years to come. It also frees up our internal IT team to focus on developing solutions that directly make life better for the scientists, teachers, and students who rely on JoVE to change how science is done.
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