Facing the Mock Game Before Actual Game Starts

See, Cricket is India’s favorite sport and people celebrate it like any festival. So, it is a cricket match especially Indian Premier League, then it is obvious that the traffic will definitely hit millions but we cannot expect the exact number earlier. So to check how much load an application can handle, large-scale testing is conducted to check the capabilities of the platform.

In the case of IND vs. NZ, the Hotstar team created an in-house project “Project HULK” to test their platform. The infrastructure used is massive in number as you can see in the image above.

Look at the load generation infrastructure in the above image which will generate and handle the loads. The c59 xlarge machines were distributed in 8 different regions which go to the internet and then to CDN to lead the balancer to autoscale and then to the application. The machines are distributed in 8 different regions because they are hosted on the cloud which may affect other customers of the same cloud. Every load balancer has a certain peak value upto which it can handle the load but in this case, every single application of Hotstar use around 3-4 load balancer to distribute the load which leads to scalability.

If you are a Cricket fan, then you must remember the IND vs. NZ 2019 World Cup, where Hotstar made a world record of 25M+ live streamers watching that match with a smooth watching experience and almost zero downtime. Many sports like Football and Cricket are streamed by millions of users and during peak times like IPL, football world Cup, or India vs. Pakistan match, these numbers will be much higher than expected and OTT platforms have to handle this much traffic without any downtime for a seamless user experience.

Have you ever wondered how OTT platforms like Jio and Hotstar manage their technologies like scalability, Database and load balancing, and live streaming without any downtime having millions of users at a particular instance of time? Let’s understand this in the article.