About Us

SM Entertainment, headquartered in Seoul, Korea, is an entertainment company that operates in planning, recording, film and music production, event management services, and other entertainment businesses.
Established in 1989, SM Entertainment manages popular K-pop stars such as EXO, NCT, and Red Velvet.

Challenge

• The existing physical infrastructure faced difficulties in supporting services during periods of new album launches, as traffic increased by 1,000 to 10,000 times compared to normal times due to the explosive popularity of K-POP stars.
• The need to review infrastructure strategy arose during the process of forecasting infrastructure size required for the development and release of ‘everysing’, a karaoke application for desktop and mobile.

Our Role

• Utilizing Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to efficiently store and manage over 30,000 songs for the everysing application
• Scaling up instance numbers as needed with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to handle rapidly increasing traffic, and reducing instances to save costs during periods of lower demand
• Expanding the MySQL database that stores information on artists, songs, and albums with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
• Using the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network to cache popular content in advance and transmit it to app users located nearby as needed
• Operating 70% of the IT environment on AWS infrastructure and using the AWS Management Console to manage web application performance and optimization
• Leveraging business-level AWS Support to maximize technological support for application and service development projects.

Outcomes

Reducing Operating Cost by More Than 50%

• Operating cost for artist PR page and website has been reduced by up to 30%
• In the case of karaoke and smartphone video applications, it is expected that operating costs would be at least 50% higher if not operated using AWS but through an on-premise data center

Maintaining Availability of 99.999% and Low Latency

• The IT infrastructure supporting ‘everysing,’ which has been downloaded 4 million times, maintains an availability of 99.999%
• App users have shown high satisfaction levels with a network latency of less than 10ms

Minimizing Personnel Needed to Maintain Service Infrastructure

• Thanks to the ease of use of AWS, the manpower needed to maintain the newly developed ‘everysing’ and ‘everyshot’ app service infrastructure has been minimized, accelerating the development process and maximizing the productivity of the technical team as developers can directly access AWS and add resources within 15 minutes.