Rackspace Technology and Humen.Ai Collaborate to Streamline Artificial Intelligence-Powered Dance App

Rhea-AI Summary

Rackspace Technology (NASDAQ: RXT) announced a collaboration with Humen.Ai to enhance the Sway: Magic Dance iOS application, achieving up to 70% reduction in infrastructure costs. By migrating to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) with Spot Instances, Rackspace streamlined the app's infrastructure from 400 AWS G4 instances to a serverless model, allowing quicker app updates. This transformation is expected to boost throughput and pave the way for expansion into various entertainment sectors, while redirected cost savings can fund further innovations.

Positive

• Achieved up to 70% reduction in infrastructure costs.
• Improved application update speed and throughput.
• Enabled future expansions into sports, TV, gaming, and movies.

Negative

• None.

Human.Ai Expected to Save 70% on Infrastructure Costs

SAN ANTONIO, Dec. 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rackspace Technology™ (NASDAQ: RXT), a leading end-to-end multicloud technology solutions company, today announced it has worked with Humen.Ai, an Machine Learning (ML)-core company that uses deep learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create personalized interactive content, to rebuild Humen.Ai’s Sway: Magic Dance iOS application, using serverless and machine learning technologies to realize significant cost and functionality improvements.

Humen.Ai partnered with Amazon Web Services™ (AWS) Premier Consulting Partner, Onica, a Rackspace Technology company, to improve its Sway app, which uses AI-powered motion filters to let users visualize themselves conducting complex dance moves. Rackspace Technology’s team of engineers quickly identified the need for a stronger infrastructure foundation for rapid releases and reduced infrastructure cost.

In just six weeks, Rackspace Technology replaced Humen.Ai’s hand-built environment with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) with Spot Instances, reducing infrastructure costs by up to 70%. The new application enables AI and production teams to get app enhancements into users’ hands faster through lightweight, containerized infrastructure.

“One of our top priorities on this project was cost savings. By consolidating the 400 existing AWS instances to Amazon ECS with Spot Instances, Humen.Ai’s infrastructure is now easier to manage and operate,” said Tolga Tarhan, CTO of Rackspace Technology. “We developed a lightweight AI infrastructure that now allows Humen.Ai to manage all of the application’s features using only serverless technologies. The newfound agility of this solution will take a huge burden off of the Humen.Ai engineering team, allowing them to focus their time on creating innovative new products.”

Prior to collaborating with Rackspace Technology’s engineering team, the Sway: Magic Dance iOS application relied on 400 AWS G4 on-demand instances controlled by a complex system that was built internally and drove up cost of operation. Rackspace Technology took the application’s ability to quickly train models and delivered a custom solution built on AWS. The solution was devised to schedule Amazon ECS containers so that the application could complete more AI tasks at the same time. The end results were showcased during the app’s 2020 Superbowl launch in partnership with Doritos.

“Working with Rackspace Technology’s engineers really helped us scale our infrastructure to support our small team during our early stages of growth,” said Tinghui Zhou, Co-founder and CEO of Humen.Ai. “We’ve doubled, maybe even tripled, our throughput of processing demands from our users. By working with Rackspace, we have unlocked time and cost savings allowing us to prepare for future expansions of our offerings to sports, TV, gaming and movies. With significantly reduced cost savings, we can now redirect funds to new ventures, like providing ways for users to collaborate and share content within the app and improving the app’s photorealism output with 3D-based perception for its skeleton and scene-analysis ML models.”

In total, Rackspace Technology reimagined Humen.Ai’s iOS application by implementing Amazon ECS™, Amazon ECR™, Spot ASG™ (containers on Amazon ECS), AWS Step Functions™ and AWS Lambda™ (serverless) for a more optimized and efficient experience.

About Rackspace Technology
Rackspace Technology is a leading end-to-end multicloud technology services company. We can design, build and operate our customers’ cloud environments across all major technology platforms, irrespective of technology stack or deployment model. We partner with our customers at every stage of their cloud journey, enabling them to modernize applications, build new products and adopt innovative technologies.

About Humen.Ai
Humen.Ai, an ML-core company, uses deep learning and AI to create personalized interactive content. Its flagship app, Sway, allows users to create videos of themselves performing motions captured from professional dancers, athletes, martial artists, and more and share with friends.

Media Contact
Natalie Silva
Rackspace Corporate Communications
publicrelations@rackspace.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/00c2198e-a3cf-4436-88b1-f6448b48e055

FAQ

How much infrastructure cost savings did Rackspace Technology achieve for Humen.Ai?

Rackspace Technology achieved up to 70% reduction in infrastructure costs for Humen.Ai.

What technologies did Rackspace use to optimize Humen.Ai's Sway app?

Rackspace utilized Amazon Elastic Container Service, Spot Instances, and serverless technologies to optimize Humen.Ai's Sway app.

What was the impact of the collaboration on Humen.Ai's app processing demands?

The collaboration doubled, or possibly tripled, the app processing demands from users.

What are the future plans for Humen.Ai after the infrastructure improvements?

Humen.Ai plans to expand its offerings into sports, TV, gaming, and movies using the cost savings from the infrastructure improvements.