Modernizing platforms to support a brand expansion
We helped the creative licensing platform expand its editorial offering by integrating a complex legacy acquisition into its wider ecosystem.
Challenge
Shutterstock is a creative licensing platform for premium content. It features intuitive design tools and houses over 475 million assets, from photos and vectors to videos and music.
The challenge:
- Shutterstock acquired a legacy platform, Rex Features (now Shutterstock Editorial) to enhance their editorial offering in the UK. This leading photo agency supplied news, celebrity, editorial images and feature content for global media organizations around the world.
- Shutterstock needed to migrate Rex Features’ legacy platform into a modern NodeJS based application, and ultimately fully integrate it into their ecosystem.
- While Shutterstock had migrated their operations to AWS, Rex Features was developed in Perl, a UNIX based scripting language, with a SQL data store.
Further complexity came from each subscribing market having its own conditions and needs for sourcing content.
The combination of legacy technology and market-specific conditions created a fertile ground for Beyond to migrate Rex Features into Shutterstock.
Solutions
Beyond’s engineers embedded themselves within the Shutterstock team in London, to work alongside their team and learn the nuances of the business.
- After onboarding, our business analyst mapped out all features of the acquisition.
- From that, we created a target architecture based on the integration needs.
- In parallel, a DevOps engineer prepared all development pipelines, interacting with Shutterstock’s infrastructure team.
- For delivery rules, Beyond migrated the rights engine, using an intricate algorithm to deliver content based on the varying conditions.
- The team delivered code to the main Shutterstock Kubernetes clusters, integrating authentication and leveraging the code and data infrastructure from the wider Shutterstock platform.
Technologies
- NodeJS
- Amazon Web Services
- Kubernetes
- SQL
- API design
Impact
By integrating Rex features into the main Shutterstock platform, we seamlessly integrated authentication and content delivery in a modern NodeJS based application.
- 100K API calls/day served by a Node.JS based, RESTful API, providing decades of Editorial content.
- 1 year of technical roadmap creation, migrating Editorial tech into the main SSTK platform.
