BookMyShow limits backup costs with Commvault® Cloud Rewind

A New Opportunity Emerges

India’s leading entertainment platform, BookMyShow, felt the immediate impact of COVID-19. Transaction numbers and revenue collapsed, and a thriving business suddenly found cost control was paramount in every operational area.

However, BookMyShow saw opportunity amid crisis. Confident of future recovery, the team looked hard at how it could optimize its technology infrastructure, and devoted time during the operational lull to plan a strategic move from on-premises to cloud solutions.

Ralstan Vaz, Senior Engineering Manager at BookMyShow, comments, “Typically, there might be a large movie release or a big event showcase about a few times each year. But for business-as-usual, much of our capacity was unused. When there is traffic, we want to provision higher, and when there is low traffic, we want to drastically reduce capacity and cost. We used this as motivation for our move to cloud solutions, to position ourselves for lean running at low cost yet also use cloud scalability to manage those very large peaks. COVID provided exactly the right opportunity to shift our key systems to cloud.”

Using Lockdowns to Unlock Cloud Scalability

As lockdowns were finally lifted, BookMyShow had completed the move – principally to Amazon Web Services – for the majority of its applications. Backup and restore solutions were also hosted on AWS using snapshots; however, ensuring consistent backups and enabling smooth, reliable restores remained a
challenge. BookMyShow looked for a new way to ensure comprehensive data protection at considerably reduced cost, while preserving the ability to scale up to match rapidly increasing volumes and revenues.

Critically, as a full-fledged entertainment company encompassing large scale live events as also movies, it was essential to restore core functionality as a “minimum viable company” as rapidly as possible, to ensure continuity of revenue.

Initially, BookMyShow considered using plain AWS snapshots for backups, but soon realized that relying solely on this approach would add complexity and make managing and restoring data across different systems and platforms challenging.

The company wanted to match the simplicity and scalability of a cloud approach, while maintaining close cost control. One of the key factors would be the potential expense of cloud backup during peak workload, and ensuring that costs were commercially acceptable.

“The most important step is to identify critical systems, and define restore times – for example, a day, an hour or real-time – to enable operational recovery as a minimal viable company. We started with a Proof of Concept with Commvault® Cloud Rewind, looking at how we could protect critical data with a robust, rapid backup and restore process,” explains Ralstan Vaz.

He continues: “We were able to configure Cloud Rewind in just a few days, selecting the most cost-efficient solution for BookMyShow. As an additional advantage, we could add multi-region backup and restore services at a later date if it became a business request.”

Cloud Rewind, an agentless cloud-native service, provides data backup and restore within minutes, including from auto-scaled cloud environments of the kind used by BookMyShow. Cloud Rewind automatically creates an Application Environment Time Machine that enables BookMyShow to recover immediately from any application downtime, and auto-discovers new application environments to ensure complete protection.

The Show Must Go On – Based on Secure Foundations

As BookMyShow continues to scale rapidly across India ,– it now has a fully flexible, highly capable data protection solution in place. By eliminating the complexity
of plain snapshots, BookMyShow has positioned itself to grow the business and to take advantage of new opportunities, with critical data and essential applications protected.

“Cloud Rewind acts as a safety net for us, knowing that we are growing much larger now. We know the impact if something happens to the website – a disaster or a hack – despite requiring only a handful of people to
manage our entire data protection environment. Cloud Rewind reassures us that we will be able to be back up quickly on a new AWS environment,” remarks Ralstan Vaz.

“With Cloud Rewind, we know that if the worst happens, we will be able to recover within a couple of hours, ensuring an optimal and safe experience for our consumers!”