Building Streaming Infrastructure That Scales: Because Viewers Won't Wait Until Tomorrow

"In streaming, the challenge is immediate: customers are watching TV right now, not planning to watch it tomorrow. When systems fail during prime time, there is no recovery window; viewers leave and may not return. One and a half years ago, at ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE, we faced the challenge of scaling streaming applications for international users. The task fell to a team of two developers with no prior AWS experience."

"The Hub and Spoke pattern provides clear service boundaries and solves data consistency issues by creating a single interface for all internal and external communication. Cell-based architecture reduces blast radius by splitting traffic across regions, user types, and platforms, multiplying scaling capacity exponentially. Multi-layer caching can reduce database load to under ten percent, enabling smaller clusters and more cost-effective multi-region strategies."

Streaming demands immediate, reliable delivery because viewers abandon services during prime time failures. A two-developer team at ProSiebenSat.1 scaled international streaming through iterative improvements, removing single points of failure and increasing availability and scalability. The architecture shifted toward a hub-and-spoke model to centralize communication and enforce service boundaries. Traffic was partitioned into cells across regions, user types, and platforms to reduce blast radius and multiply scaling capacity. Multi-layer caching reduced database load to under ten percent, enabling smaller clusters and more economical multi-region deployments. Multi-region decisions required transparent cost-benefit communication, and managed serverless services allowed focus on business logic.

Read at InfoQ