Hotstar Case Studies

OVERVIEW:

Disney+ Hotstar also known as Hotstar is an Indian subscription video-on-demand over-the-top streaming service owned by Novi Digital Entertainment of Disney Star and operated by Disney Entertainment, both divisions of The Walt Disney Company, featuring domestic Indian film, television, and sports content for India itself and its worldwide diaspora. It also includes imported content and serves Southeast Asia as well.

The brand was first introduced as Hotstar for a streaming service carrying content from Disney Star's local networks, including films, television series, live sports, and original programming, as well as featuring content licensed from third parties such as HBO and Showtime among others. Amid the significant growth of mobile broadband in India, Hotstar quickly became the dominant streaming service in the country.

How does Hotstar handle live streaming?

Hotstar leverages Akamai's geographically distributed servers to speed up web content delivery. This means every time you watch a live stream on Hotstar, it's not coming directly from Hotstar's servers, but it's coming from one of Akamai's servers located near you.

What is the Akamai that Hotstar leverages:

Basically, Akamai is Content Delivery Network, Akamai enabled Hotstar's content delivery right from its inception in 2015. To support the massive surge in subscribers and it is Fast for its video content distribution.

Let's understand how Hotstar handles traffic:

In 2019, Hotstar created a global record for live streaming to 25.3 million concurrent viewers. Let's check the scenario:

We all remember the day, During the ICC 2019 World Cup Semi-Final between India and New Zealand, the same day Hotstar set a new world record for live streaming to 25.3 million concurrent viewers. That's more than any other platform has ever managed before! We can say this is the Technology Miracle that happened with almost zero downtime.

And the important thing is, there was a sudden huge spike in users when Dhoni came to bat which raise the platform to live users from 16M to 25M+ live users.

How did Hotstar achieve this? And what things happened during this process? Let's take a look.

The first spike witnessed was from 1.5M to 15M, as India started batting. And then Dhoni came in to bat, and there was another sudden spike in traffic, taking it to 25.3M concurrent users. But then Dhoni got out, and suddenly there was a drastic viewer drop from 25.3M to <1M users.

So there are backstage heroes who handle this all:

• Cloud Computing

Hotstar uses cloud computing to leverage the benefits of scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. Hotstar uses cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host their applications and services, enabling them to scale up or down as needed and reducing the need for expensive infrastructure.

All the traffic is served by the EC2 instances & S3 Object store is used as the data store. The services use a mix of on-demand & spot instances to keep the costs optimized. Running machine learning & data analytics algorithms on spot instances helps the business cut down costs by quite an extent.

• DevOps

DevOps has become an essential tool for software development and delivery in the modern era. Hotstar is an example of successfully adapted DevOps practices to improve their software development and delivery processes. By implementing CI/CD pipelines, IaC, monitoring and logging, microservices architecture, and cloud computing, they have been able to deliver high-quality services to their customers quickly and efficiently, while also improving their internal processes and collaboration between teams. As such, DevOps has become an integral part of any organization looking to improve its software development and delivery process.

However,

Hotstar maintains an in-project called "Project Hulk" for load testing and generations. It tests the system's resilience and helps them find its breaking points. It allows them to mimic the entire user journey with different inputs and can also simulate entire traffic patterns like this match.

Hotstar does not use traditional autoscaling from AWS because it comes with challenges, such as insufficient capacity errors, which can't be handled during live events. Also, the limited step size makes it slow to scale during live events.

So they have built their scaling strategy. It allows them to pre-warm their infrastructure before high-concurrency events like live matches. Also, it allows automated proactive scale-up with a buffer to handle a sudden spike in traffic. It also allows secondary autoscaling groups to act as backups and gets utilized in case the primary fails to scale.

Also, to manage high concurrency events like this, they turn off their non-critical services such as recommendations, personalizations, chat, and emojis services to decrease the load on backend servers. They also follow graceful degradation to resolve errors without impacting actual customers. It helped them to stay afloat during the traffic peaks.

Hotstar is a great example of how to deal with sudden traffic spikes. It shows the significance of being prepared beforehand and building a good infrastructure so your website can handle any traffic load.

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