Entertainment modernizes the coupon experience with Red Hat

Entertainment® has been a household name in the U.S. and Canada for more than 60 years. It connects consumers with local merchants by offering discount coupons they can redeem in exchange for discounted dining and travel experiences, attractions, and more. When it decided to swap paper coupons for a digital experience, its legacy environment lacked the scalability and functionality to get new features to market quickly. The team collaborated with the Red Hat Cloud Services Customer Success team to implement Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS and can now deploy in minutes instead of weeks. Its customer-facing website and apps are more stable, scalable, and reliable, and with a fully supported application platform, engineers at Entertainment® now have more time to focus on innovation.

 Entertainment® was founded in the 1960s, publishing coupon books with discounts for local attractions. The company is a household name in the United States and Canada. Today, it offers more than 500,000 digital coupons connecting 40,000 merchants to local consumers across 10,000 cities. It serves consumers and merchants, and sells subscriptions to raise funds for local causes in the community. 

The company was acquired by Kigo, a subsidiary of Augeo, in 2023. Kigo aims to transform loyalty engagement by replacing paper coupons with dynamic digital consumer experiences. It plans to grow Entertainment® to reach 15 million active users, expanding into new regions such as Europe and Australia, and bringing personalized, local rewards to more consumers.

“To achieve our growth goals, our website and customer-facing apps need to be scalable, supported, and reliable,” said Ian Foster, Vice President of Technology, Entertainment®. “Customers expect the same modern experience they’d get with a takeout app – they want to browse local offers in their area to find what they need.” 

Entertainment® was mired with legacy on premise technology, which limited app development and scalability. The team put a workaround in place, cloning onsite servers and lifting and shifting workloads to the cloud. But it was difficult to manage and unsupported, which meant there were no updates or patches. This complex environment led to an unsatisfactory developer experience and made staff retention and recruitment more challenging.

“We needed a future-proof platform, a strong DevOps culture, and a fully working CI/CD pipeline,” said Paul Smyth, Senior DevOps Engineer, Entertainment®. “We couldn’t afford issues with the backend infrastructure impacting our website or apps, and we wanted to empower our developers with better tools.” 

The company began looking for a solution for its AWS environment. The team considered building its own Kubernetes infrastructure to leverage in-house skills but ultimately decided it would be easier to find a fully supported application platform and free up skilled staff for higher value tasks.

Entertainment® worked with Red Hat to implement Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, a fully managed turnkey application platform that makes it simple to build, deploy, and scale apps in a native AWS environment.

“We had a meeting with the Red Hat Managed OpenShift Black Belts, and realized right away it was the perfect platform. It has all the functionality we need with Red Hat site reliability engineers (SREs) looking after the platform,” said Smyth. The engagement with Site Reliability Engineering Foundation helps customers build a DevOps methodology that uses organizational and operational best practices to balance developer team velocity and needs with operational reliability. “You don’t get that level of support with other products,” said Smyth. “It was a pretty obvious choice.”

Entertainment® worked with the Red Hat Cloud Services Customer Success team to implement the platform. These cloud services Black Belts helped to configure OpenShift Service on AWS to meet the company’s specific needs. For example, the team set up on Argo CD, which is a declarative continuous deliverytool for Kubernetes and part of the CI/CD workflow. Together, Red Hat Black Belts and the teamat Entertainment® then extended the functionality and connectivity to AWS ECR to deliver the frictionless experience that the company uses to migrate legacy APIs to modern microservices and to deploy new releases. 

“OpenShift Service on AWS comes with so many built-in tools you can practically point and click to configure it,” said Smyth. “Previously, we had to write code but with OpenShift Service on AWS it’s already written, and system engineers can release code to production in just a few clicks. The system doesn’t take old code down until the new code is working properly, so there’s been zero downtime. Argo CD is one of the slickest CI/CD pipelines I’ve ever worked with.”

The Red Hat Cloud Services Customer Success team connected Prometheus for metrics and performance monitoring, and integrated the platform with Slack for incident management and alerts. This automatically notifies the right people when an issue needs their attention without generating emails or needing staff to constantly monitor dashboards. They can simply look at logs to see what’s happening in real time and fix the issue faster.

Improved stability, reliability, and scalability of backend infrastructure 

OpenShift Service on AWS provides a stable, reliable application platform that doesn’t require hands-on management. This also makes it more accessible for less technical staff, who can be productive with less specialist training.

The website usually gets 100,000 visitors a day but can comfortably manage peaks of around 1 million with autoscaling. It’s self-healing, providing workarounds to keep apps available while the team fixes bugs or issues. And if the team needs more help, Red Hat SREs are always available. 

“OpenShift Service on AWS gives us more breathing space. We used to spend a day preparing for peak periods. Now we know the platform will handle it automatically,” said Foster. “This stability was crucial when the company was up for acquisition. It made us an attractive opportunity for Kigo.”

Accelerated time to market for new consumer apps and services 

Since implementing OpenShift Service on AWS, Entertainment® has significantly sped time to market. Working with Red Hat’s Black Belt team helped to get the platform set up quickly, and the rich functionality of OpenShift Service on AWS makes it easy to deploy code in seconds.

“It used to take a week to push a version of the iOS app to the App Store to be reviewed,” said Foster. “Now we can do it 8 times a day because it only takes 30-40 minutes to build, and we know there won’t be any issues during testing. 

“We had a legacy API infrastructure that we were afraid to update, that took a whole day to scale. With OpenShift Service on AWS and microservices, we push changes multiple times a day and it scales on its own. We’ve gone from planning releases 3 weeks ahead to trusting our team to push things out when they’re needed.”

Strengthened the DevOps culture, empowering staff to work on higher value tasks

OpenShift Service on AWS, combined with the DevOps culture, has made Entertainment® a more efficient, agile, and attractive place to work. Developers feel empowered to release code to testers, leaving them more time to collaborate on value-add projects.

“The human side of DevOps is extremely important, and OpenShift Service on AWS is enabling us to do things better,” said Smyth. “We’re not avoiding taking responsibility when there’s an issue. We have greater transparency and greater ownership over our tasks.” 

This freed up senior staff who no longer have to fire-fight development issues to be more productive. They can also use this time to upskill the team – for example, teaching them how to write Helm charts, which will be a valuable skill in the future.

Entertainment® has achieved its vision of implementing a stable, scalable application platform with OpenShift Service on AWS, and now it’s looking to the future. The team is exploring how to collaborate with other departments to get ready for peaks in demand. For example, if the marketing team sends a campaign that will generate a lot of traffic in one area, the platform can be ready to scale if the right team is notified.

“The sky’s the limit with OpenShift Service on AWS. We’re putting a monitoring system in place to make our pipeline more intelligent,” said Smyth. “By watching traffic logs in OpenShift Service on AWS, we can use rules and logic to identify where and when there’s likely to be a surge in demand.” 

And OpenShift Service on AWS will help the company to grow into new regions, making it easier to develop multilingual, multicurrency offers and simplifying General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance in Europe.