NOW Music

The challenge

NOW That’s What I Call Music! is the biggest selling compilation brand in the world. Since the release of the first NOW album in 1983, no one has come close to challenging this world-renowned label.

But with online streaming services having decimated physical formats, our task was to design, build and deploy a new, stronger AWS infrastructure for NOW Music Plus, the brand’s own streaming platform. Appropriately for such a popular brand, it had to be capable of performing efficiently under heavy demand and support the rapidly-growing user base.

With a rapidly-changing market, how could NOW ensure they stayed on top while catering to a digital audience?

The proposition

We first pitched our services for the NOW project through our partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Instead of using our time with the client to regurgitate standard lines about the benefits of the cloud, we asked questions about the project, driven by our curiosity and passion for the challenge.

We come from a development background. AWS is a purely operations-focused team. They chose us for our thorough research, obvious expertise and no-nonsense approach, and together, we created a cohesive partnership. Importantly, we supported NOW’s internal development team during and after the project.

The project journey

The infrastructure had been struggling when faced with particularly high demand. A marketing push could successfully generate a big uplift in new registrations, but the platform wasn’t fully optimised and couldn’t cope with the surge in traffic.

As part of the migration to the new AWS infrastructure, we moved the application to a set of microservices used in a Kubernetes cluster, to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of the NOW Music Plus app. This included day-to-day consultations with the development team as we identified the best approach to migrating and hosting the app, followed by a fully-managed service post-launch.

The impact

Leveraging Isotoma’s experience with AWS, NOW Music Plus’s infrastructure was reimagined

“Let’s be honest. When it comes to the work we do, there are a finite number of tools. So it’s approach, experience and relationship that makes the difference. With NOW, ours gelled well with the internal development team, winning us the work and smoothing the way for a great project experience.”

— Doug Winter, CTO and Founder at Isotoma

Using our experience in AWS operations to build a new infrastructure meant we could harness performance efficiency best practice to break down the application’s monolithic architecture and deploy AWS scaling tools across the cluster. The result is an application that doesn’t miss a beat, even when the volume of active users reaches a crescendo.