Improving the performance of a large audio streaming platform

The client’s audio platform is available across 200 connected devices, including web, mobile, voice assistants (Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana), home sound systems (Bose and Sonos), smart TV, gaming consoles, and smartwatches. To keep up with the growing customer base, our client needed to improve platform usability on all devices and boost its efficiency in handling high amounts of requests, especially at peak times.

Our team has helped the client refactor their platform code from .NET Framework to .NET Core. Also, we have migrated the on-premise data center to AWS by moving all workloads to Kubernetes while maintaining several EKS clusters and supporting ECS clusters. One of the main challenges was developing backup solutions using Amazon S3 in the multi-account environment. To overcome this challenge, we moved everything that was created manually on the AWS Console to Terraform. Additionally, the infrastructure that had been written for Windows was migrated to Linux to reduce licensing costs.

Our experts have also utilized multi-level cache (in-memory cache, Redis cache, and databases) to allow the platform to process up to 20,000 requests per second. Scaling up during peak hours was achieved with the use of HPA and different scaling types, e.g., based on CPU, based on SQS queue length, etc. The use of Amazon CloudFront to cache the content in edge locations ensured no delay in content delivery.

Finally, we have re-implemented Alexa Skill Lambda with new dialogs and action choices and performed Amazon Alexa Skill Account Linking to unify the subscription approach. It enables users to link their Alexa user identity with their identity in other services (in this case, the client’s platform) and pay only for one subscription instead of two.

N-iX has helped the client boost the performance of their audio streaming platform and gain several substantial benefits:

• Reduced expenses and greatly increased scalability by migrating the on-premise data center to the cloud and moving platform infrastructure from Windows to Linux;
• Enhanced the performance and user experience by enabling the platform to handle high amounts of requests at peak times without delay in content delivery;
• Improved platform usability across different connected devices by adding new features like Alexa Skill Account Linking that unified the subscription approach.