ODK Media Slashes AWS Cloud Costs By 35% With Mission

Executive Summary

ODK Media is a provider of online media streaming services – enabled by AWS – that bring overseas Asian programming directly to an American audience. With its engineering teams in South Korea but its user base and corporate leadership in the U.S., ODK sought a U.S.-based AWS partner that could unlock cost savings and provide ongoing cloud optimization. At the same time, ODK was also interested in potentially migrating its CDN services from an external provider to Amazon CloudFront. Mission performed this migration, achieving greater reliability and performance across ODK’s customer-facing streaming services. Most importantly for ODK, Mission led significant AWS cost optimization initiatives and helped the company utilize enterprise discount program (EDP) savings, CloudFront private pricing, business support savings, and reserve instances optimization. As a result, ODK now saves 35% in overall cloud costs since moving to Mission as its AWS partner.

“The collaboration with Mission has resulted in tremendous benefits to our bottom line. Mission also goes the whole nine yards to provide end-to-end support and best practice recommendations. With Mission supporting our engineers, our service is more reliable than it's ever been. I wholeheartedly recommend Mission.”

John Kang
Chief Operating Officer

The Challenge

ODK Media initially worked with a cloud managed service provider in South Korea, where its engineering team was based. However, with ODK’s leadership and customer base in the U.S., the media company saw advantages in switching to a U.S.-based AWS partner. As a cloud-first company using AWS from its launch, ODK utilized S3 for cloud storage and EC2 instances to run software in the AWS Cloud. The company also used CDN services external to AWS, tasked with delivering video content to its end customers as quickly as possible. 

With ODK steadily growing and expanding into new services and markets, the company wanted to explore a potential migration to AWS CloudFront, as well as the potential savings and improvements to reliability and performance that could come with ongoing optimization. ODK sought out partners that had the requisite expertise in providing a reliable service for its customers.

Why AWS?

ODK chose AWS as the leading cloud provider with the most established capabilities for supporting its reliability-intensive infrastructure needs as a global online streaming service.

Why Mission?

ODK expressed interest to its AWS representative in finding a U.S.-based partner with the expertise to introduce a new CDN, infrastructure, and cost savings strategy. AWS recommended Mission due to the partner’s proven success in solving these pain points for other customers. 

“When I felt it necessary to work with a cloud services provider located in the U.S., AWS was quick to hook us up with Mission. We hit it off and had a great relationship right off the bat."

John Kang
Chief Operating Officer

Strategy and Solution 

Mission began work by optimizing ODK’s EC2 spending through Mission’s reserved instance optimization (RIO) program and managing reserved instances on the company’s behalf. Mission then optimized ODK’s complete AWS environment through Mission Cloud Foundation, which delivered ongoing AWS cost management, cloud optimization and governance. Based on its positive experiences with these services , ODK worked with Mission to become an AWS enterprise discount program (EDP) customer, leveraging Mission-led enterprise support for additional cloud savings. Crucially for ODK, Mission also led the migration of the customer’s CDN services to Amazon CloudFront and got the company set up with CloudFront private pricing, significantly reducing its costs compared to its previous CDN provider. 

“With Mission, we've done a ton of optimizations that have improved our cloud costs,” said Kang. “And obviously, migrating our CDN services to AWS and CloudFront has realized substantial cost benefits as well. Working with Mission has delivered on every opportunity to improve bottom-line performance for our business.”

Results and Benefits

Mission-enabled cost management, cloud optimization and savings strategies have reduced ODK’s monthly cloud spending by 35% versus the customer’s incumbent structure. With Mission’s help, ODK recently renegotiated its AWS CloudFront private pricing and EDP discount, locking in those savings for an additional three years. At the same time, the quickly-scaling business now has a more reliable, performant, and optimized AWS environment from which it can confidently expand into new services and markets – all fully supported by Mission’s team of AWS experts.

“In terms of working with our employees, Mission’s team has been excellent in giving us a valuable heads up when they see certain spikes or traffic anomalies. With Mission’s support, our developers and operations team can react very quickly to events. That certainly improves our employees’ effectiveness and their morale, knowing that someone is constantly monitoring potential problem areas and has their back.”

John Kang
Chief Operating Officer

Next Steps

Looking forward, Mission will continue to proactively seek out and execute additional opportunities for ODK to realize cost savings wherever possible. ODK has also discussed the potential for adding Mission support and optimization specific to its video streaming function.

AWS Services

• AWS S3
• AWS EC2
• Amazon CloudFront