FantaSanremo we all know it, but how was it born and above all how was it made? Let’s start by saying that Amazon’s tools have been essential for managing the exponential increase in users, who have been increasingly fascinated by its functionality.
FantaSanremo and success thanks to Amazon tools
Born in 2020 a Porto Sant’Elpidio in Marche from the idea of a group of friends who are passionate about the Sanremo Festival, FantaSanremo moves to the Web in 2021. It explodes sensationally during the edition 2022 of the Festival. Growing at a very high rate (10x year on year), the organization decides to adopt the solutions Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront). In this way it allows us to ensure users the highest possible reliability, while containing costs.
For the edition 2023 and to guarantee a still growing future, FantaSanremo has also adopted Amazon API Gateway e AWS Lambda to simplify development and management activities. This led to:
- 3x the speed of the platform compared to the previous solution.
- 4.2 million teams managed in the 2023 edition.
- 30% reduction in team management costs.
- 7 million peak users managed during TV broadcast.
FantaSanremo, how it was born
Born in 2020 as the evolution of one of the listening groups of the Sanremo Festival, FantaSanremo held its first edition in completely offline mode, in a bar in Porto Sant’Elpidio. The mechanics of the game are similar to those of fantasy games. A virtual team is formed with real characters (in this case the singers of the Festival) thanks to which points are obtained or lost depending on their behavior in the competition.
The following year, thanks to the pandemic and therefore the impossibility of meeting at the bar, a group of enthusiasts creates a website designed to host a hundred teams. Quickly, thanks to word of mouth on social media, the teams become approx 50mila.
Thus prefiguring a success that will also come in the following years, with growth that has now led the platform to manage more than 4 million teams and 7 million users at peak times. FantaSanremo and the other initiatives, born in the wake of the success of the first, were managed, from an IT point of view, directly by the organisation’s CTO. There is no lack of support from the AWS Bolket Partner.
The leap in quality of FantaSanremo thanks to Amazon tools
FantaSanremo achieved the real leap in quality when, in anticipation of managing an increasingly higher number of teams and users, it decided to change cloud service provider by choosing AWS. “Based on the advice provided by partner Bolket, we decided to adopt the AWS cloud.
The decision derives from the vastness of the services offered, the possibility of counting on extensive documentation and unrivaled technical support.” He stated Giacomo Piccinini, co-founder of FantaSanremo. And again: “we also needed to implement a system that was reliable even in the presence of large peaks, scalable, economically sustainable and safe”.
The birth of FantaEurovision
In the meantime, FantaSanremo had already been joined by another initiative, FantaEurovision, with similar mechanics to the first but based on the Eurovision Song Contest event. “Our intention,” he continues Little ones, “was and is to position ourselves as leaders in the gamification and second screen experience sector. Creating new games and new formats to be applied to television broadcasts but also to editorial and marketing projects.”
Switching to AWS for reliability, security, and simplicity
In 2022, in anticipation of an exponential increase in platform workloads, FantaSanremo turns to AWS with the aim of finding the reliability and performance necessary to manage the dizzying growth in traffic. For the organization’s engineers, cloud and serverless services are also the key to keeping costs at a sustainable level and ensuring the right level of security for users and their data.
Immediately, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) it is used together with AWS CloudFront to guarantee the scalability and performance essential to support the impact of the Festival on the Web application. In 2023, with a view to further simplifying management, Amazon API Gateway for the creation, maintenance and security of APIs and AWS Lambda for serverless computing will also be adopted.
