NativeDSD

Getting you closer to the original performance

Project

Sector: Arts, entertainment & music

Size: xxx

Budget: $50,000 to $199,999

Verticals

- Streaming

- Big data

- E-commerce

Technologies

- PHP/Laravel

- Docker

- AWS

- Hetzner

- Shopify

- Wordpress

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The Company

Nativedsd is a music platform like Spotify but focused on ultra high end audiophiles. The customers of Nativedsd need specialised audio equipment that cost tens of thousands of dollars just be able to listen to their purchased audio files. Customers buy the content digitally via one time purchases, subscriptions or streaming.
To achieve such high quality expectations NativeDsd and it's partner labels provide all audio in studio quality formats that are lossless encoded and have multiple audio channels. A studio quality audio file delivered by NativeDsd is 10-20x larger than a regular audio file delivered via services like Spotify.
NativeDSD stored audio data is 200+ TB and the infrastructure traffic is 50+ TB / month.
Audio data storage and delivery is by far the most important operational cost for the platform. Keeping this cost low enables NativeDSD to stay profitable and grow.

About the project

NativeDSD operates since early 2010s and due to it's success it has outgrown their early tech stack & infrastructure.
As the business found it's market fit it still had lots of old features/tech decisions that limited it's ability to move forward faster with lower operational costs.
The project has been focused on:
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(1) migrating from an earlier tech stack to a new one => performance, stability, faster development & lower TCO (Total Cost Ownership)

Before

  • no CI/CD pipeline & no containers
  • self hosted Wordpress shop (heavily customised with plugins)
  • a custom PHP backoffice with legacy framework
  • a desktop app written in JS / Atom Electron

After

  • docker containers & full automated CI/CD & test/prod envs
  • docker containers & full automated CI/CD & test/prod envs
  • Shopify based shop (customised with minimal plugins)
  • completely rewritten platform/backoffice in PHP/Laravel with async first architecture
  • completely rewritten desktop app with PHP/Laravel
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(2) migrating to a more efficient infrastructure for data storage & delivery => 10x cheaper storage & data delivery

We discovered that NativeDSD had very specific storage and delivery needs and AWS forced us to pay a lot for many features we didn't actually use. A hybrid approach (AWS, Hetzner, Bunny) was the right fit at much lower costs.

Before

  • AWS compute & database
  • AWS S3 storage & Cloudfront data delivery

After

  • AWS database + AWS Outpost (managed dockers for bare metal)
  • Hetzner bare metal compute
  • Hetzner bare bones data storage
  • AWS Glacier for long term backups
  • Bunny CDN data delivery

10x

cheaper storage & data delivery

100%+

performance, stability, speed

100%+

faster development & lower TCO

Remote Reason has improved the site's speed and backend functionality. The team has facilitated a structured and precise workflow, delivered weekly reports every Monday, and communicated via calls, chats, and meetings. They've also created steps to simplify the problem and craft a clear solution.

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Jonas Sacks

CEO, NativeDSD Music

LinkedIn Clutch

What we delivered

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Migration to Shopify shop

  • We migrated all the old shop data & integrations from Wordpress (with Woocommerce) to Shopify. This included integrations like payment provider (Stripe & Mollie), Intercom, Mailchimp and others.
  • The platform synchronises with Shopify (via webhooks and REST APIs).
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New platform

  • The newly built NativeDSD platform keeps all it's master data (users, customers, purchases, albums, subscriptions, etc) in it's core platform.
  • The platform exposes audio data (with signed urls) and metadata via REST APIs. These API endpoints are used by external systems (Shopify, Desktop catalog app, Streaming brokers) to deliver services to the NativeDSD customers.
  • Additionally the platform is responsible for audio data collection delivered via FTP by partner labels and also automated long term backups at scale.
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New backoffice

  • The newly built backoffice is used by the NativeDSD team to automate the importing of data, manage products & publish to Shopify.
  • Additionally the web portal has separate modules used by the partner labels (ie. organisations that record and publish albums) to validate, fix and deliver their audio files to resell them via the NativeDSD main shop.
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New Desktop catalog app

  • The newly built backoffice is used by the NativeDSD team to automate the importing of data, manage products & publish to Shopify.
  • Additionally the web portal has separate modules used by the partner labels (ie. organisations that record and publish albums) to validate, fix and deliver their audio files to resell them via the NativeDSD main shop.

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