Introduction
Globo is the largest media group in Latin America, and Brazil's leader in broadcast TV, pay TV, online, print, and radio. Its streaming platform GLOBOPLAY delivers to 25 million users and foresees investments of 1 billion Brazilian reais (195 million US dollars) for 2020, focusing on content and technologies. Globo was the one to successfully air the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the 2016 Summer Olympics, numerous presidential races, as well as a myriad of TV series and reality shows.
Globo has one of the most modern infrastructures for content distribution in Brazil and is transforming itself into a media technology company. In November 2019, Globo reorganized its operations along products and service lines joining five units: TV Globo, Globosat, Som Livre, globo.com, Globoplay, and DGCorp.
The organization's development and production environments are based on open-source technologies, with Linux as operating system and MySQL Enterprise Edition as the relational database. Globo.com, responsible for the digital products of the group, has used MySQL to create a Platform as a Service (PaaS) inside a private cloud. Among many projects it uses MySQL to keep Cartola FC - an online fantasy soccer game, up and running for more than 5 million registered users.
Business Challenges & Goals
- Improve performance and scalability of web portal applications such as Cartola FC, a fantasy soccer game that requires constant uptime for more than 12 million users.
- Gain efficiency and economy of scale by smoothly delivering Infrastructure-as-a-Service across the entire organization.
- Obtain competitive advantage associated with massive volumes of space photographs captured and pulled into the database.
- Focus development efforts on new content creation instead of database features, system administration, maintenance, upgrade and security, thereby channeling time and energy into entertainment business value.
Business Results & Metrics
- Ensured 99.999% availability of Cartola FC to millions of online players leveraging MySQL Enterprise Edition's elastic scalability, with web portal uptime guaranteed through MySQL Enterprise Monitor, Backup, Query Analyzer, Workbench as well as other performance and scaling key features.
- Adopted MySQL Enterprise Edition as the relational database behind the company's Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) offering, allowing rapid provisioning of MySQL instances to all content creators of the Globo Group.
- Offloaded previous system administration, maintenance, upgrade, and security tasks tasks to Globo's DBaaS, allowing developers to concentrate on delivering personalized content to millions of Brazilians using Cartola FC as well as other sports and entertainment platforms.
- Supported millions of simultaneous Cartola FC gamers by scaling on-demand with a Master-Master MySQL architecture guaranteeing access during peak times such as player market close and fine-tuning of teams, when scaling becomes paramount.
Why MySQL Enterprise Edition?
"We have used MySQL for more than 10 years as our main relational database for web solutions. It is a cost effective, stable, and resilient technology with good performance and ease of use. Every new version comes with substantial improvements and new features contributing to competitive advantage for the organization," said Camila Dias, IT Manager, Globo.com
Implementation
Globo has a large talent pool of MySQL specialists. The IT team handled the migration to MySQL Enterprise Edition, getting in contact with Oracle Premium Support upon necessity.
About Globo
Globo is the largest mass media group of Latin America, founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1925. Its TV channels reach 54 million Brazilians and even higher number of users access the company's content streaming platforms. Its flagship online fantasy game, Cartola FC, attracts more than 12 million players competing to win virtual soccer matches based on the performance of real players in the Brasileirão - the Brazilian Championship A Series contested by 20 teams in 38 match fixtures throughout the year
In December 2019, Globo was elected Communication Content Producer of the Year by Caboré, Brazil's most prestigious award ceremony in the communications industry. To know more about Globo, visit https://www.globo.com.