CASE STUDY

Samsung

Scaling up for the Super Bowl with Amazon CloudFront

Samsung 1

Amazon CloudFront Scales Environment for Super Bowl Traffic

Samsung wanted to create a new type of advertising campaign for customers that connected on their Smart TVs during the Super Bowl during Katy Perry’s Halftime Show. The challenge at hand was – how do you create and maintain more than 4,000,000 concurrent connections and all of that data being transferred in and out of Samsung Smart TVs during the biggest, live television event in history?

Industry

Consumer Goods

Challenge

Create infrastructure to maintain more than 4,000,000 concurrent connections and all of that data being transferred in and out of Samsung Smart TVs during the biggest, live television event in history

Services & Tech

Cloud Infrastructure, Amazon CloudFront, Big Data, Professional Services On-Demand

Handling Massive Traffic & Massive Data

Onica worked diligently to make sure Samsung’s environment could scale and handle the Super Bowl-sized traffic load all at once. Since the Halftime Show is such a highly watched, live event, the tremendous flash of traffic arrives and then disappears much quicker than normal television content. The team at Onica partnered with Samsung’s developers to model this traffic load in the time building up to the big game. This ambitious project not only required developers to write the code needed for Samsung’s Smart TVs, but also infrastructure specialists that could help to build a scalable and elastic infrastructure that could handle 4,000,000 concurrent connections.

A Super Bowl Sized Solution

Samsung uses Amazon CloudFront, Amazon’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) to push data back from their Smart TVs into AWS. The Smart TVs have a logging system that registers each box within AWS. Based on this information, Samsung can then tailor content and a unique user experience to each Smart TV viewer through Amazon CloudFront.

Onica and Samsung tested and built the Super Bowl Halftime Show solution for 500,000 total requests per second, all being driven through Amazon CloudFront. Onica performed a significant amount of load tests on a number of occasions, with each one increasing up to the event. To test durability, Onica tried to break the system and was successful in making 1,000,000 concurrent requests per second.

In order to perform these load tests, Onica used a variety of tools. The Samsung team also provided Live TVs across America to help simulate these load tests, which created a realistic experience for what the Super Bowl load might look like during the Halftime Show.

Samsung 2
“My team was swamped and the Super Bowl was a huge undertaking. Onica helped set expectations for us and handled any and all AWS issues we had.”
Dang Tran
Director of Data Intelligence

As a part of this project, Onica worked with our Amazon partners to monitor traffic internally to view testing and production in real time. With more than 500,000 connections per second success, Amazon uses this case study as an example of just what their cloud infrastructure can accomplish.

Additionally, Onica leveraged the power of big data through AWS. At the peak of the Super Bowl, around 2.4 million Smart TV’s were being actively used. Within a custom built VPC, the high volume data was delivered to an Elastic Beanstalk Node.js application. Next, the real-time data was loaded and distributed to a Amazon Kinesis Data Stream, which then was sent to a multitude of consumer servers. Log data was then staged and loaded into Amazon Redshift from Amazon S3. By heavily utilizing Amazon Redshift, the large amount of live data originating from S3 buckets was constantly processed and analyzed. Through our ongoing partnership with Samsung, Onica has been able to move more than 40 applications into AWS.

Largely due to big data on AWS, Samsung delivered live feedback and data from more than 6.5 million Smart TVs.

WHY US

Why Onica

Onica is one of the largest and fastest-growing Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partners in the world, helping companies enable, operate, and innovate in the cloud. From migration strategy to operational excellence and immersive transformation, Onica is a full spectrum AWS integrator. Learn more at www.onica.com.