Case Study Replatforming of TVNOW – migrating and further developing an existing video-on-demand platform © inovex 2021 CBC, the joint production and technology/IT The new strategy included replatforming using arm of the RTL Germany media group, manages an external cloud partner, AWS, a factor which several of the media group’s products, including required additional changes to working pro- the channels RTL, VOX, NITRO, n-tv, NOW! and cesses. The vision was a setup with cross-func- GEO Television. The current joint project with tional, autonomous teams, each of which could inovex focuses on TVNOW and aims to crea- independently advance the development of their te a secure and innovative platform to handle own area. upcoming challenges in the TV and entertain- At its core, the “DevOps” concept describes a ment markets. The project’s goals are to move corporate culture free of hierarchies and silo the platform to the cloud, to restructure the thinking. Instead, it focuses on effective collabo- topics and teams, and to switch to agile working ration between development and operations in methods. order to rapidly implement stable, high-quality Initial situation and target vision software. Originally, TVNOW was operated by RTL in its These changes also necessitated a rethink of the own data centre. The company, however, wan- processes and team structures. The teams‘ ca- ted to make the platform more innovative and pabilities were pooled and the platform aligned resilient and capable of deploying new features with them. At the start of the project, technical more quickly. staff were reassigned to specialist teams such as content, payment, and metadata. The product The data centre location did not allow elastic owners – experts in their respective professional scaling, and adding new services invariably invol- fields – also serve as key liaisons between the ved lengthy coordination and approval proces- teams. ses. Only a few staff members had the requisite knowledge and the clear separation between the New programming languages were also intro- development and operations departments made duced, such as Kotlin on the backend and Type- communication difficult. Script on the frontend, for example.
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