Flexify.IO has shared a case study which describes how Musify, a streaming music service provider based in Japan, used Flexify.IO to achieve 80% cost savings and improved performance.

When CEO David Liu launched Musify, he chose Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in Tokyo as its cloud service provider. As Musify grew and required more and more storage, the volume of stored data reached over 500TB rather quickly. At the same time, Musify’s customer base was expanding beyond Japan to include Latin America, Europe and beyond, introducing latency issues to the equation. Predictably, the costs to store and move all that data began to skyrocket.

Liu discovered that migrating his data to Backblaze B2 in the U.S., while taking advantage of their partnership with the content delivery network offered by Cloudflare, would save him about 80% over what he was spending with GCP. Not only would storage and egress costs be greatly reduced, but also network performance would be improved for Musify customers. After contemplating the technical and logistical challenges of doing this migration himself, Liu discovered Flexify.IO through a Google search.

The Challenge

Musify had several unique needs that required a tailored approach. First, Musify had many outdated objects that the company didn’t need to pay to move, so they provided a list of files to Flexify.IO for the migration project. Segmenting parts of the data in this way inherently made the project more complex than moving all of the data in its entirety.

Secondly, all of Musify’s data had been stored in one bucket with GCP, although the data comprised three different types of objects, each type being a different size. This could cause problems to arise over the course of the migration. An “off-the-shelf” migration solution was not going to work for Musify.

Although Liu and his team had the engineering skills to get the job done internally, the time and effort required would take them away from the more important work of continuing to build their business and meeting the needs of their growing global client base. Ultimately Liu decided that such a distraction was not wise, and he went looking for viable alternatives.

The Solution

The first challenge of working from a list of files rather than all of the data stored with GCP Tokyo required Flexify.IO to develop a tailored strategy. The Flexify.IO team was able to successfully implement a new feature in Flexify.IO to support this more complicated task, and they did it in less than two weeks.

When it came to Musify’s storage architecture, Flexify.IO guided Liu in thinking about future scalability by suggesting the separation of songs, lyrics and images into three different buckets at Backblaze B2, which optimized the migration in terms of storage. Although it added another layer of work to this migration project, implementing an architectural improvement was a strategic move that Musify had not considered doing on their own. It also afforded Musify the opportunity to do some much needed clean up, creating a fresh start for their next level of growth.

In the end, Musify’s migration with Flexify.IO was completed in a fraction of the time it would have taken Musify to manage it internally. Through a combination of informed choices, custom coding and knowledge of how to leverage networking options, the partnership between Musify and Flexify.IO resulted in improved performance and options for migrations that might be needed in the future.