Modernizing a regional sports network’s digital platform with AWS and DevOps agility

The client is an Emmy Award winning, multiplatform regional sports network serving approximately seven million homes in the New York Metropolitan area and nine million homes across the country through unparalleled coverage of the New York Mets, Jets and all things New York sports. The client is the official television home of the New York Mets, televising more than 130 live games each season with exclusive pre- and post-game programs, plus additional Mets entertainment programming airing throughout the calendar year. As the official television home of the New York Jets, the client delivers more than 300 hours of exclusive year-round content devoted to Jets football. The client is also the official television home of the 11-time NCAA Championship UConn Huskies women's basketball team.

As New York's leader in local sports television coverage, the client delivers the most comprehensive access to all of the Tri-State area's professional and collegiate sports teams through nightly sports and entertainment programs from the client's state-of-the-art studio located high above the city at 4 World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan. Online, the client's primary digital platform is the "go-to" digital communal home for New York sports fans to get succinct, easy-to-read updates, video highlights and features, recaps, news, opinion, rumors, insight and fan reaction on their favorite New York sports teams. Owned by Sterling Entertainment Enterprises, Charter Communications and Comcast, the client is available to viewers throughout New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and northeastern Pennsylvania, and nationally through select providers.

The Challenge

The client faced significant challenges with the content refresh process of its primary digital platform. The refresh operation, which was critical for delivering timely sports updates, took nearly 20 minutes to complete. This process involved refreshing all data at once, with no support for incremental or differential updates, leading to inefficiencies and delayed content delivery. 

The existing solution was deployed using AWS Amplify, which introduced additional limitations. While Amplify streamlined some aspects of deployment, it also restricted extra customization and integration with other AWS services. Specifically, Amplify's architecture tightly couples infrastructure components—such as Lambda functions, API Gateway, and Cognito user pools—into a single stack, limiting flexibility. As a result, it was not feasible to easily integrate with resources inside a VPC, such as Redis, which was essential for the client's caching and performance strategy. 

To overcome these limitations, the client asked Monks to modernize and optimize the website refresh process and improve architectural flexibility for future enhancements.

The Solution

The client originally relied on AWS Amplify to manage its infrastructure for its primary digital platform. Amplify is a powerful solution for quickly standing up front-end applications-it abstracts away much of the complexity by provisioning and managing common AWS resources like:

• API Gateway
  
• Lambda functions
  
• Cognito user pools
  
• S3 buckets
  
• DynamoDB
  
• AppSync
  
• CloudFront
  
• IAM roles
  

While this approach worked well for early development, it became limiting as the platform's needs evolved. Amplify is designed as a black box, simplifying setup but restricting advanced customization. As the client's platform matured, those limitations began to affect performance and scalability. 

Specifically, the client encountered challenges when trying to:

• Customize cache headers and CloudFront policies
  
• Integrate with VPC-based resources like Elasticache (Redis)
  
• Fine-tune deployment behavior and service interoperability
  

In short, the Amplify-managed stack made it difficult to optimize and connect with the broader AWS ecosystem as deeply as the client needed. 

To address these limitations, the client partnered with Monks to transition to a more flexible and powerful infrastructure strategy using Infrastructure as Code (laC)—with Terraform as the chosen tool. 

Terraform allowed the team to:

• Recreate the essential services provided by Amplify (e.g., CloudFront, Lambda, S3).
• Gain full control over configuration details Amplify typically abstracts.
• Create anotherAWS resources as Secrets Manager and Elasticache Redis that were not included in the amplify stack.
• Integrate easily with external AWS resources, including those inside VPCs, specially some lambda functions..
• Version and audit all infrastructure changes using Git.
• Implement security best practices via granular control over IAM and policies.
  

With Terraform, the client could go beyond the constraints of Amplify and:

• Optimize for performance and flexibility
  
• Maintain consistent, repeatable deployments
  
• Enable deeper observability, governance, and security

Something else that was included during the implementation, after 

Terraform provided the client with full control of its infrastructure—allowing custom optimization, seamless service integration, and a robust foundation for future growth. The transition empowered the team to improve performance and deliver a faster, more responsive experience on the client's primary digital platform. 

By moving from a managed solution to an laC-driven approach, the client gained the agility and precision needed to scale confidently and innovate faster-while keeping infrastructure transparent, traceable, and secure.

The Results

After migrating away from AWS Amplify and rebuilding the infrastructure using Terraform, the client gained full control over its architecture, enabling better performance tuning, service interoperability, and integration with resources like ElastiCache. 

Before the refactored site was delivered, load and performance tests were conducted by the client. These tests uncovered some performance bottlenecks in the new architecture. To diagnose and address the issues, the team implemented AWS X-Ray for API Gateway and Lambda functions. 

With X-Ray’s tracing and monitoring capabilities, the team was able to:

• Identify slow or resource-heavy requests
  
• Analyze latency at different stages of request handling
  
• Pinpoint inefficient call patterns
  

This visibility allowed for targeted optimizations to how requests were made and processed, ultimately resolving the performance concerns and ensuring the new site was stable, fast, and production-ready.

This approach also allowed us to easily replicate the infrastructure in other environments using the IaC solution implemented.

About Monks

At Monks, we partner with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to leverage cutting-edge cloud technology, delivering innovative marketing and technical solutions to clients around the globe. Through partnership with the AWS Advertising & MarTech team, we empower organizations across industries to harness data effectively, transforming it into actionable insights that drive new business value and create a competitive advantage. Our strong focus on rapid application development and expertise in DevOps practices ensures we can build and deploy these transformative solutions with speed and efficiency. Together with AWS, we are committed to helping businesses unlock the full potential of digital marketing in an ever-evolving landscape.

Interested in learning more about our partnership and capabilities with AWS? Head over to our AWS Partnership page on Monks.com.