Streaming Platform Architecture with Luca Mezzalira and Yan Cui

Demand for live streaming video over the internet is increasing. After the emergence of early live streaming platforms, like Twitch and Facebook Live, more forms of video have become accessible over live streams, such as sports. Live streaming is a harder engineering problem than delivering a static video file because the information distributed on a live stream is constantly changing.

DAZN, spelled D-A-Z-N, is a live streaming service for watching fight events, such as boxing. The workloads for live streaming can be highly bursty. When a fight is scheduled to happen, the vast
majority of traffic will hop on to watch the fight 20 seconds before the fight starts. A huge number of users logs into DAZN and starts watching all at the same time. This quick spike in traffic means that DAZN has to have servers spun up and be ready in advance.

Luca Mezzalira and Yan Cui are chief architect and principal engineer at DAZN. Yan was previously on the show in a few amazing episodes to talk about serverless infrastructure and the complexities of real-time video game software development. Those episode links are in the show notes. I highly recommend checking them out. Today’s show is a discussion of architecting a system to handle a high bandwidth customer use case. I hope you like it.