Gracenote Simplifies VPC Management and Scalability Using AWS Transit Gateway

Gracenote, a Nielsen Company, provides metadata and automatic content recognition technologies to global enterprises. “Whether it's music, TV, video, or sports, we have descriptive metadata that drives advanced content search and discovery for music services, TV providers, automakers, and other customers,” says Alex Linden Levy, vice president of engineering at Gracenote. The company offers products such as MusicID, a music recognition software that helps deliver artist metadata and cover art to more than a 100 million car audio systems around the world. Gracenote’s database also includes television show descriptions, cast and crew information, movie synopses, and sports statistics.

Gracenote, which runs its business on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, has grown quickly, and it creates an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for each new account and team. To enable this, Gracenote wanted to give each of its engineering teams their own isolated AWS accounts, without having to allow VPC peering for each account back to a shared services account. “Once we created that architecture, it became this spider web of a mess,” says Linden Levy. “We had to peer the VPCs across one another, and it was difficult to maintain. We didn’t want to spend our time managing that—we wanted to focus on delivering new features and growing the business.”

To solve this problem, Gracenote implemented AWS Transit Gateway, a service that enables users to create and manage a single connection from a central gateway into each Amazon VPC. AWS Transit Gateway provides a hub-and-spoke model, which simplifies management because each network only needs to connect to the Transit Gateway and not every other network. “AWS Transit Gateway provided the architecture we were looking for, because it enabled us to isolate teams in an AWS account while still giving them the ability to collaborate,” Linden Levy says.

Now when an employee or team requests a new account, the Gracenote IT team can create the account automatically, and the private subnet is routable within the overall Nielsen network. The company takes advantage of AWS Direct Connect to establish a dedicated network connection to its data center for all VPCs. Each private subnet is treated as part of the organization’s standard network, and accounts are isolated without being siloed. Linden Levy says, “Within an account, each team is free to use any AWS service without having to come to our DevOps team to set up permissions for them.”

Using AWS Transit Gateway for its shared services, Gracenote can easily integrate VPCs across accounts, which are managed through a single technology. If someone asks for an AWS account, the IT team creates it automatically and connects it to AWS Transit Gateway, so all production or non-production accounts in an environment can communicate with each other. “We went from having four VPCs in each account to having 200 total accounts, all managed centrally,” says Linden Levy.

With automated account creation, Gracenote can swiftly establish new accounts when engineers are onboarded. “Setting up accounts used to take five days because of our internal processes and the network team that had to do the work,” Linden Levy says. “Now, the entire process takes about 45 minutes because of the automation of AWS Transit Gateway.” As a result, Gracenote engineers can develop and deploy new software features faster than before. “When teams are ready to begin a project, they can have an account in less than an hour, with no consultation necessary from IT,” says Linden Levy. “AWS Transit Gateway has really helped our developers to quickly deliver new features for our customers.”

The company’s new architecture is also facilitating expansion into new regions, such as Australia. “We signed a contract to supply metadata for a television broadcaster in Sydney, and we were able to provide our software to that customer in 4 hours, instead of the days it would normally take,” says Linden Levy. “That’s a great example of how quickly we can move.” By using AWS Transit Gateway, Gracenote will be able to continue expanding rapidly and offer its services to more customers in additional regions.

To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/transit-gateway.