Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. partners with Tech Holding to create a platform that consolidates and promotes global markets as a single brand.
The Challenge
As the face of the company, the international Warner Bros. markets would like to have a centralized platform that can provide the tools to push each market forward as a unified brand. Doing so would allow local markets to provide a discovery interface for movies, tv, and games that can be recognized globally. The main challenge being that these markets vary in terms of architecture, features, and legal requirements.
Our Approach
To meet these requirements, a common infrastructure with a mechanism to toggle features on and off was created to accomplish the following:
- An easy and safe method for exporting title data: this was accomplished by creating a custom library that provides a RESTful endpoint for every movie, tv, game title in the system.
- A scalable infrastructure: this was accomplished by creating infrastructure that is 100% managed by terraform, a popular infrastructure-as-code tool. This removes all manual steps and allows provisioning of new markets within minutes.
- A modular, fast, developer friendly front end: this was achieved by incorporating react-static, a fast, lightweight, and powerful progressive static site generator based on React and its ecosystem. React-static also provides rich features such as server-side rendering and page prefetching.
Benefits
Our approach was immediately allowed us to do the following:
- Migrate data for existing markets into the new platform: A common data structure allowed the team to do a data mapping that will match the business rules of the new environment.
- Provide a clean slate environment for new markets: A common infrastructure allowed the team to get a new environment ready for market data entry in a matter of hours.
On top of these two scenarios, the team was allowed to create infrastructure modules that can be easily shared and expanded as new services are added to the system. This enabled us to publish partial changes to the site in a matter of seconds. Due to the nature of static sites, this is also very cost effective as public traffic does not need to reach any internal systems; all of this traffic is directed to an AWS S3 bucket where the static files are hosted. Lastly, the internal systems are not exposed to the public, minimizing the attack surface and providing a secure framework for data entry and storage.
Modular, scalable and turnkey on boarding
There are three things required for onboarding a new market: environment configuration, data entry and feature configuration. Our approach makes the first two steps effortless as the technical teams can accomplish these steps in a matter of hours. In regards to feature configuration, the market has the capability to decide on which modules they would like to use. Each local market has the capability to toggle title pages, feature queues, banners, brands and collections as they see fit. This allows for a great deal of customization while staying on the path of being a unified global brand.
Headless CMS
The headless CMS approach allowed us to provide a place where publishers and developers can safely store title data. This was accomplished by allowing access only to users within the Warner Bros. network and whitelisting internal systems that need to be able to communicate with the CMS to export the title data. This headless CMS is also entirely configurable. Settings such as database, server, cache size can be customized to fit each market’s needs.
A Modern Front End System
Our approach uses the React Static framework to create a static site. In order to achieve this, we created small, reusable components that are shared throughout the site. The benefit of this approach is that it pushes the concept of one brand across all of the markets. Font sizes, color palettes, and overall styles can be shared with all of the markets. Another benefit of sharing components between markets is that new features and enhancements are automatically applied to every market. This approach has proven to be effective as it is currently deployed to 26 global markets, with many more in the roadmap.
System Dependencies
Terraform: The framework for infrastructure as code. Any setting for each market can be easily searched and modified.
AWS Lambda: A serverless solution that allows us to run code without provisioning or managing servers. This allows to run functions for updating content, providing a search service, and resizing assets.
AWS Elastic Container Service: A fully managed container service that allows us to host the headless CMS with flexible options for each market.
AWS S3: Provides a location to store and host the static site. This allows us to deliver a site that is highly available and scalable.
Our Partners
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