Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences relies on Azure and Visual Studio to innovate and increase efficiencies

The situation

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is the world’s preeminent movie-related organization, comprising more than 10,000 accomplished members working in cinema. Founded in 1927, the Academy’s mission is to recognize and uphold excellence in the motion picture arts and sciences, inspire imagination, and connect the world through motion pictures.

The Academy is known best for its Academy Awards® ceremony, popularly known as the Oscars®. Given annually, the Oscars are a global recognition of excellence in cinema, as determined by the Academy’s voting membership. The Academy also maintains a film archive of more than 230,000 items and a library of more than 10 million photographs, and it will open a museum in April 2021.

Until seven years ago, the annual process leading up to the Academy Awards occurred entirely offline. Solicitation of award candidates was done on paper, DVDs were copied and distributed to members, and voting was done via postal mail. The Academy had a static website, every business unit managed its own IT, and most information existed on paper or in desktop computer databases.

The Academy’s use of technology as a strategic asset began in 2014, when Bev Kite was appointed its first Chief Information Officer. Within a few years, the Academy had centralized software development and IT infrastructure teams. It also launched a member portal, enabling the Academy’s thousands of members to consume content, sign up for events, pay dues, maintain their profiles, and stream films for select award categories.

Although a lot was accomplished in those first few years, Kite’s five-year plan called for even more. Academy leadership had recently given her the go-ahead to deliver a new app for Academy members and to make all award categories available for streaming across all major platforms, including Apple TV (tvOS), iOS, and Android.

Her biggest fear, however, was that achieving those goals wouldn’t be possible with an on-premises infrastructure. “Scalability was a big concern for my infrastructure team,” she says. “They were doing a great job, having already expanded our IT infrastructure significantly over a short period of time to meet our rapidly evolving needs. However, we knew that we would need to scale with even greater speed and agility moving forward.”

Les Jin, Director of Infrastructure at the Academy, explains the challenges his team still faced: “We already had a few hundred virtual machines and were deploying 8 to 16 new ones for every new project, in addition to moving virtual machine workloads around in an attempt to keep everything optimized. We had hit our limits in terms of compute and data storage, and the physical aspects of scaling were taking time away from our ability to help deliver new value in other ways. We couldn’t afford to deliver a poor online experience as we further expanded our digital footprint.”

Kite and her team knew that the answer to that challenge was the cloud, with its almost limitless scalability. But which cloud platform? Two key goals drove the decision process. “First, we had dozens of .NET Framework apps with SQL Server back ends, including our main member portal, which we had to quickly migrate to the cloud,” recalls Nick Amparano, Associate Director of Applications Development at the Academy. “In parallel, we had to quickly deliver a new member streaming app, and we wanted to use Xamarin to target multiple platforms at once.”

The solution

The Academy quickly decided that Microsoft Azure had the strongest managed offerings for its Microsoft .NET and Microsoft SQL Server workloads. “We’re a Microsoft shop, so Azure was the natural migration path,” says Kite. “The process for migrating our .NET Framework and SQL Server apps to Azure was straightforward, .NET and Visual Studio offered a strong mobile development platform with Xamarin, and everyone recognized how its extensive DevOps tooling would help our development and infrastructure teams collaborate more closely.”

Migration to Azure

The Academy’s migration from on-premises to Azure took about a year. In the first few months, the Academy’s development and infrastructure teams worked closely with personnel from Microsoft to solidify requirements and define an initial architecture. Following that, Jin’s team set up a virtual network on Azure for staging and production environments, configured the desired Azure services within those virtual networks, set up a virtual private network between Azure and the Academy’s on-premises environment, and granted developers the necessary access rights. The infrastructure team also led the effort in terms of budget and security.

After everything was up and running on Azure, the migration process went smoothly. The Academy began by moving its main SQL Server database to the cloud and into Azure SQL. “We connected to Azure SQL from a .NET Framework app that was still running on-premises, and it worked great,” recalls Amparano. “We then moved our data access and API layers to Azure, and again we were successful. Finally, we moved our first and most important ASP.NET web app—our main member portal—into Azure App Service. It all went really well.”

The real test of the Academy’s new cloud platform came next when Academy leadership prioritized the mobile streaming capabilities. At minimum, the development team had to deliver a streaming app for the Apple TV platform, and now that the member portal was in the cloud, tie the streaming app into the portal for member voting. Making all this happen also entailed enabling movie studios to upload their own films and protecting those assets with full digital rights management.

“The goal was to support streaming all the award categories, including Best Picture, which we could never have done with our on-premises infrastructure,” explains Kite. “Delivering a compelling streaming app was critical for achieving buy-in from our membership, especially given that our goal was to stop distributing films on physical media within the next few years.”

After meeting that key milestone, Kite’s team continued developing its Android and iOS apps and migrating the rest of its existing .NET applications to Azure, including those for seating and ticketing at the annual event. “Today, we’re about 95 percent done moving our legacy apps to Azure,” says Kite. “The Apple TV app is in production and is being very well accepted, and the iOS and Android apps are now in beta.”

Development and DevOps

Amparano’s nine-member team performed all development for the Academy’s move to Azure, including delivery of three new streaming apps. The team used a combination of Microsoft Visual Studio 2019, Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 for Mac, and Microsoft Visual Studio Code. This gave each team member the freedom to choose the best integrated development environment for the job without limiting their ability to work together as a team and perform activities such as sharing NuGet packages. “For the iOS and tvOS apps, we were able to develop on a Windows computer and remotely connect to a Mac, or we could work within a Parallels environment on a Mac and remotely connect to iOS for debugging,” says Amparano. “Visual Studio makes cross-platform development easy.”

Support for Xamarin in the .NET platform was the key to cross-platform development, giving developers an open-source platform for delivering modern, high-performance streaming apps across all target platforms. They used native Xamarin C# code for the tvOS app and Xamarin.Forms for iOS and Android, enabling them to power all three apps using the same back-end services while achieving a 50–60 percent level of code reuse.

“We’re very happy with Xamarin,” says Amparano. “When I was first asked to investigate an approach for building a tvOS app several years ago, I started down the Swift route. When revisiting the topic sometime later, I saw how much Xamarin had matured. Today, native bindings for Xamarin are updated quickly, typically within a few days, so that everything pretty much works like a native SDK library.”

As part of its efforts, Amparano’s team also moved its development infrastructure to the cloud. It now uses Azure DevOps to manage the development lifecycle, including the use of Azure Pipelines to automate build, test, and release processes. The team also adopted Azure DevTest Labs for app validation. When necessary, the team uses Visual Studio Live Share to collaboratively view, edit, and debug shared code.

Architecture

On Azure, the Academy’s .NET Framework applications run in Azure App Service, a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web apps. As part of its move to App Service, Amparano’s team took advantage of App Service deployment slots to eliminate the need for a separate deployment environment. “Deployment slots have shaved hours off the time it takes to deploy new code, including the elimination of any downtime” says Amparano. “Today, we can push new code into production anytime—and do so very quickly, with a high degree of confidence in the results.”

Adds Jin, “In the past, deploying updates to our member portal typically required about 30 minutes of downtime. And as use of the portal increased, this became more of a challenge. Being able to eliminate downtime for maintenance windows has been a big win for the member experience.”

Data that used to reside in on-premises SQL Server databases now resides in Azure SQL, which shares its code base and SQL query language with SQL Server. This enabled Amparano’s team to quickly and predictably move its data to the cloud and immediately start benefiting from all the advantages of the fully managed service, including on-demand scalability, extensive monitoring and alerting, guaranteed high availability, automated performance monitoring and tuning, and more. Day-to-day database management functions are also automated, enabling the team’s single database administrator to no longer worry as much about mundane tasks like patching, backups, and upgrades.

Other key Azure services that the Academy uses today include:

• Azure Media Services, a fully managed media workflow platform with which the Academy can index, package, and catalog its large media library, including AI-driven metadata generation that will help members find content of interest.
• Azure Active Directory B2C, which handles identity and access management for the Academy’s member-facing web and mobile apps.
• Azure Monitor, which collects telemetry from other Azure services to give the Academy full visibility into its apps and infrastructure, including comprehensive Application Insights (application performance monitoring) for the apps that are running in App Service.

With its IT infrastructure now fully up and running on Azure, Kite’s team plans to begin modernizing software components that it moved to Azure largely as is to run on .NET Core, as a means of moving toward an even more agile microservices-based architecture.

“Our relationship with Microsoft over the past few years has improved our software architecture and solved our infrastructure issues,” says Kite. “The work we’ve done on Azure so far has modernized the skill sets of our IT team to the point that we now consider the move to .NET Core as a natural progression.”

The results

With Azure, the Academy was able to migrate its legacy web applications to the cloud and deliver its new streaming applications quickly, safely, and cost-effectively, with minimal code changes. Academy members now enjoy a rich, responsive online experience across a range of devices, enabling them to engage more closely with the Academy as it works to recognize and uphold excellence in the motion picture arts and sciences.

“Our move to Azure was smooth and straightforward, especially with the assistance that our Microsoft account team provided,” says Kite. “Nobody understands .NET and SQL Server better than Microsoft, which, through Azure, gave us a robust set of managed services for migrating our legacy applications to the cloud.”

The 92^nd Oscars® aired live on February 9, 2020, with Parasite becoming the first non-English language film to win the coveted Best Picture award. Leading up to the event, the Academy used its new Azure infrastructure to stream 850 movies to its members across all 24 award categories.

“Azure gave us built-in scalability and high availability, which allowed us to take more risks,” says Kite. “We were able to go from streaming just a few award categories to streaming all award categories, including Best Picture. Even better, because Azure is subscription-based, we no longer need to pay for more scalability before we need it. We can scale up when heading into the screening and voting season and then scale back down when there’s less traffic. Had we continued with an on-premises infrastructure, to get the scalability we needed for the next few years, we were looking at an upfront capital investment of $2–3 million.”

Soon after the event, at the onset of COVID-19, the Academy’s new Azure environment helped it successfully make the transition to working remotely. “Everything we do now is through the cloud, including ongoing software development,” says Kite. “Azure helped us keep going during COVID-19. If we had still been on-premises, it would have been more difficult. We’ve managed to increase our ability to respond to member needs because we’re a lot more agile and flexible.”

Amparano agrees with Kite’s sentiment, adding that from a development perspective, his entire team is still more productive even though they’re working remotely. “The entire application lifecycle, from code check-in to deployment, is a lot smoother on Azure,” he says. “We’re twice as productive now as we were before, and the reason is that we can focus fully on development instead of getting pulled into infrastructure issues. We own the app services and resource groups, and our infrastructure team manages the rest. It’s all working out very well.”

Looking back, Kite has no major regrets over the path her team has taken—especially its decision to collaborate with Microsoft. “We had massive dreams, and Azure helped us get there.”

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