The company

Established in 1999, OzTAM is the official source of television audience measurement (TAM) covering Australia’s five mainland metropolitan markets (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth) since 2001.

Upon launching, OzTAM reported ratings for five free-to-air (FTA) channels: ABC, SBS, Seven, Nine and Ten. Since that time OzTAM’s service has steadily expanded to reflect the evolving television landscape, new technologies and changing nature of audience behaviour. OzTAM now measures and reports viewing to more than 100 channels, both FTA and National Subscription Television (STV)

2010 saw an introduction of the Time Shift Viewing (TSV) service, recognising the increasing use of personal video recorders (PVRs) followed by a Video Player Measurement (VPM) reporting service in 2016.

The Challenge

With a 4000% increase in monitored events each day within 5 years, OzTAMs data helps the media industry understand viewer behaviour, assists in program development and advertising planning, and measures the performance of television programs, networks and advertising campaigns.

With such high demand, it is mission critical that their infrastructure is highly available 100% of the time – 24/7, 365 days a year. As such OzTAM understands they need to continuously review and secure their architecture to keep ensuring availability, scalability and responsiveness for their customers as their business and customer needs grow.

Their growth pain was that their current instances would become unpredictable over 70% CPU utilisation which caused consistency and predictability to be an issue, leading to a lower than desirable CPU utilisation target and wastage.

The solution

OzTAM expanded their team by partnering with AC3 to review their current AWS infrastructure and provide advice on opportunities for architectural improvements and cost optimisation.

AC3’s recommendation was to migrate the workload from traditional x86 CPU architecture to the then latest ARM architecture developed by AWS, Graviton 2. AC3 requested preview access for OzTAM to begin testing the effectiveness of ARM over x86.

OzTAM was able to migrate easily between x86 and ARM using an interpreted programming language and AWS libraries.

The advertising data is now collected via an in-house application, streaming data to AWS Kinesis via the AWS Kinesis Producer Library. As the ingestion process is highly transactional and at a fast rate, it is designed to be highly efficient with limited complexity.

OzTAM want to continue to improve and build on services and utilise AC3’s expertise to manage, optimise and automate their AWS environment.

OzTAM’s specific workload relative performance efficiency was 22% higher with ARM compared to x86, resulting in a 35% cost efficiency.

The results

With OzTAM’s advanced capabilities and AC3’s expertise, the migration was straightforward and a success.

From the start with testing the x86 to ARM migration, the importance of performing operations as code and making frequent, small, reversible changes were clear.

The workload is now configured to scale horizontally based on relatively low CPU threshold limits significantly increasing reliability to the point of being reliable up to 100% CPU saturation. This significantly increased the predictability of the workload and effectively provided significantly more burst capacity across the collectors (EC2 instances).

With improved reliability, OzTAM were able to adjust the limits used for predictive auto-scaling. ARM has allowed OzTAM to further sharpen their high-performance architecture through improved reliability, tighter limits and the improved architecture.

OzTAM’s specific workload relative performance effiiency was 22% higher with ARM compared to x86, resulting in a 35% cost efficiency.