The experience with Azion’s technical support was a pleasant surprise. Before, we had the vision of Azion as a service that works very well, but the speed in meeting requests, even outside business hours, and all the monitoring effort made during CCXP showed us how much the company is a partner.
Jota Russo, Technical Lead at Omelete
Challenge
Brazil’s largest entertainment company, Omelete (or the Omelete&CO group), brings pop culture to millions of geeks across the country through successful projects such as CCXP and Game XP. The company faces the challenge of delivering increasingly fast and reliable digital experiences to a highly engaged audience, since:
- speed is a key factor for great user experiences;
- 61% of users share negative experiences with friends;
- 49% of internet users abandon their favorite brands after a poor experience.
In Brazil, these challenges are even greater because internet quality remains inconsistent in several regions, and traditional solutions often cannot deliver the performance expected by Omelete and its millions of unique visitors.
These obstacles became even more significant during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Omelete had to organize its largest annual event — Comic Con Experience (CCXP) — in an unprecedented way: fully digital.
By adopting the Azion Platform, Omelete not only moved its services to a distributed infrastructure with presence across Brazil, but also gained access to the expertise needed to improve application performance and deliver better digital experiences to its audience.
Solution
With the Azion Platform, Omelete runs applications on a modern distributed architecture and optimizes its services using tools such as:
- Image Processor: allows Omelete to optimize and manipulate website images in real time without compromising visual quality;
- Application Acceleration: enables high-speed access to group websites, even on unstable networks, through protocol optimization and advanced request and response rules;
- Cache: accelerates the delivery of static and dynamic content by keeping it cached within Azion’s infrastructure, closer to users.
In addition to the performance gains enabled by the Azion Platform, the creation of Applications helped Omelete significantly reduce costs with its cloud provider by decreasing the number of requests processed by its origin infrastructure.
Results and impacts
In 2019, more than 70 Applications created by Omelete processed billions of requests, with only 15% reaching the origin infrastructure. The rest were delivered by Azion’s infrastructure.
As a result, Omelete&CO evolved its digital ecosystem in several areas, optimizing everything from website staging processes and live events to sections of the Omelete Store and other official group stores — which are protected by Azion’s WAF against fraud and sophisticated threats.
With 100% availability across Brazil, Omelete’s applications are protected by the multilayer security of the Azion Platform and Firewall capabilities that help:
- automatically block access from the Tor network using Network Lists;
- mitigate DDoS attacks that could compromise service availability;
- enable the creation of Applications protected against zero-day attacks.
In addition, Omelete’s strong latency and processing performance metrics help the brand maintain a strong position in search engines.
Searching for information about the latest Batman movie or reviews of the series you just binge-watched? Chances are the results will lead you to Omelete.
Success with the first fully digital CCXP broadcast
CCXP is the largest pop culture festival in the world. In six years, the event gathered more than 1 million people, more than 120 actors and creators from film, TV, and series, and thousands of comic artists and illustrators.
In 2020, for the first time in its history, the event took place entirely online.
The digital edition featured more than 150 hours of original content and over 1,000 artists, with broadcasts reaching 113 countries worldwide.
In this context, Azion’s mission was to provide scalability, availability, and performance for Omelete’s applications.
The result was impressive: Applications improved the user experience by up to 15×, delivering static content from CCXP Worlds, including more than 10 TB of images distributed through Azion’s infrastructure, without impacting the origin infrastructure.
During the event, traffic volumes reached 100× the average request volume handled by Omelete’s servers in 2020 and 1,000× the average data transfer volume, with a large share of requests delivered through Azion’s infrastructure.
With a globally distributed network, Azion enabled Omelete to maximize its event promotion investments and remain online even during massive traffic spikes.
About Omelete
Omelete&CO is behind some of the most successful projects in Brazil’s geek culture ecosystem, including the Omelete news portal, CCXP (Comic Con Experience), and Game XP.
Founded more than 18 years ago, the company began as a media and content creation platform and evolved into one of the largest entertainment ecosystems in Brazil, producing everything from editorial journalism to large-scale international events.
Today, Omelete is considered the most influential pop culture brand in Brazil, with strong editorial coverage across movies, TV series, comics, books, and music, reaching more than 15 million fans and influencing the consumption of entertainment products and experiences across the country.