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    Live Events & Streaming Scale

    Surviving traffic spikes for global broadcasts with resilient edge and observability

    Stable streams and predictable autoscaling under peak load
    Client
    Confidential — media & entertainment
    Industry
    Media & Entertainment
    Timeline
    3 months
    Technologies
    7+ tools

    The Challenge

    !

    Spiky traffic during live events overwhelming origin APIs

    !

    Inconsistent cache behavior across regions

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    Limited real-time visibility into viewer experience and CDN health

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    Post-mortems that could not pinpoint whether issues were edge, origin, or player

    Our Solution

    Tuned multi-layer caching with cache-key discipline and stale-while-revalidate patterns

    Implemented autoscaling policies based on custom metrics, not CPU alone

    Built dashboards correlating CDN, API latency, and error budgets

    Ran load tests that mimicked regional fan-out and encore traffic

    Documented runbooks for brownouts, failovers, and graceful degradation

    Measurable Impact

    Peak capacity

    Proven

    Rehearsal events validated headroom before flagship broadcasts

    Incident clarity

    Better

    Mean time to identify root cause dropped with unified telemetry

    Viewer experience

    Steadier

    Rebuffering and start-time metrics stayed within targets during spikes

    Cost

    More predictable

    Rightsized origins and smarter TTLs reduced over-provisioning

    "Our biggest night of the year used to be a coin flip. This time we knew what healthy looked like—and we had levers when the internet misbehaved."
    V
    VP engineering
    VP Engineering, streaming platform (NDA)

    Technology stack

    AWS CloudFront
    Fastly
    Kubernetes
    Prometheus
    Grafana
    Locust
    Terraform

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    Live Events & Streaming Scale | Case Study | SystimaNX