"The cloud computing environment that Metal Toad built provided significant savings on our traditional in house hosted environment while delivering a more reliable site, and providing a better customer experience."
— Gerard Lomonaco, VP Operations/Technology, Sony
Business problem: Expensive, unreliable legacy tech
Sony Rewards is the destination for fans to earn prizes for enjoying Sony content. But the site had a popularity problem: during hot promotions, the traffic surge would overwhelm their servers and crash the entire site. And general site unreliability was undermining conversions.
The issue was outdated tech: Sony Rewards was hosted on old physical IBM servers. There was no way to scale up capacity when needed, and the clunky legacy infrastructure led to unreliability.
Technology solution: Elasticity and reliability in the cloud
Metal Toad’s first order of business was to get the site’s capacity up to snuff with an elastic cloud solution using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Now their server capacity can stretch to meet traffic demands.
A number of other innovations have improved the site’s reliability. With Amazon Cloud Formation, we can repair in a few hours issues that used to take days to resolve. The Amazon Virtual Private Cloud gives the team full control and avoids unexpected downtime. Microsoft Always On Clustering reduced the number of servers needed.
Impact: More revenue, less cost
In past years, site outages during Black Friday weekend caused Sony Rewards to lose customers. Last year, we doubled their server capacity—and kept the site humming (and generating revenue) all weekend.
These improvements save money, too. Eliminating the capital investment in physical servers frees up over $150,000 a year, and reducing server space saves around $200,000 a year on infrastructure operations.
Sony Rewards Case Study One Sheet
