Hotstar with Amazon Web Services for the Era of Gbps speed.

Fig : 1 Era of Gbps [4]

By recent event of jio Technology, nita ambani announced that now it is the era of Gbps in India. (Though right now i’m not having the source.)

Here, the hotstar app acquired by star India pvt. Ltd has been given the 5700000 Mbps (5700 Gbps) of bandwidth during a live match, which somehow interesting for any tech enthusiastic person. How exactly hotstar works with the backend architecture that India choose hotstar over netflix and amazon prime video, even having the toughest competition.

Hotstar using the following techstack from AWS service.

Fig:2 Technology Used for Hotstar[1]

Ajit Mohan, the CEO of Hotstar, said “India is the only country in the world where a streaming platform like Hotstar exists, and where the best TV shows from around the world, movie premieres and live sports are available on a single platform”

Well, at current point, hearing this feels good, but the question still remains how?

At back end side, hotstar uses the architecture having the AWS services [1].

Amazon Route 53[2] and Amazon CloudFront[3] are services for the Hotstar streaming video.

Even they also use Amazon S3 for the Hotstar.

At a movement, It is obvious to feel awkward after all what this service are and how they are being used for such a vast video streaming applications.

So, Let's take a little bit look for the amazon service used for the era of Gbps.

Amazon Web Services are box of the bunch of services for any kind of users.

It doesn’t only just provide the hosting of the web services efficiently and effectively but also provide the platform to build the applications by using different functionality.

Efficient hosting by not waiting for the yearly subscriptions, which are somehow much confusing, is being provided by AWS without having the extra attention to the server services.

AWS provide any services to users at the price of their usage.

Prices will be according to the usage of the services.

Pay for whatever  you use.

Amazon Web Services is a collection of remote computing services such like web services or data retrieving, by having the cloud application platform.
AWS offers such centralize services using Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.

Having a physical data-centres, with lots of wires, routers and switches, firewalls, so many other network devices, with lots of numbers and labels over it, having a huge electricity bill of those equipment and maintenance of them is simply not an easy task to manage.
The traditional data centre looks like below mentioned image. 
(Having such a huge and complex architecture people cannot deny if they will invest for data centres instead of any gold jewellery😉)

Fig: 3 Traditional Data Centre[7]

Either organisation can focus to build or deploy the application or can maintain them with the  server processing.
AWS provides better solution for such kind of scenario with reduced cost and efficient manageable services. 

Thus, there is no doubt why hotstar application uses AWS for backend tech stack.

Services for Hotstar AWS used are explained below.

Amazon Route 53

The name itself suggests that at the port no 53, the AWS provides the DNS services to its applications. It easily and effectively connects the EC2 instances or Amazon S3 bucket, and it also provides the routing information to the outer side of the AWS infrastructure.

This makes AWS more user friendly.

Amazon EC2

Provide Scalability and reusability to the computing capacity in the AWS cloud. Which makes less to hardware and more to developing and deploying applications to the cloud. Which is more helpful to the application developers who can focus to build the different applications instead of managing them to the cloud servers. Various instances for CPU, memory, network, and storages are available as per need.

Amazon CloudFront

Low latency and High transfer speed of 5700 Gbps for hotstar is somehow possible through cloudfront as it provides Content Delivery Network (CDN) services. Any user can directly use the cloud front who is familiar with other services of AWS. It is already included with AWS subscription for the user.

Amazon S3

Storing the data and fetching them as per the need is the advantage of the AWS services.

To store, retrieve or analyze, millions of data from anywhere at anytime can be possible with the AWS S3. As at the 5700 Gbps bandwidth the hotstar is providing the live match to the millions of India public, who are crazy for match and this has already been cracked the record to provide the live video streaming.

There are just the few names used as a service of AWS. They itself are a huge research topics.
Here, I have just mentioned which services are used by Hotstar and how they make Hotstar application more stable among other video streaming application.

It provides simple, but strong technical architecture for the 5700 Gbps bandwidth for Live match video streaming.

References:

1. https://siftery.com/company/hotstar
2. https://siftery.com/amazon-route-53
3. https://siftery.com/amazon-cloudfront
4. https://tech.hotstar.com/
5. https://www.quora.com/Is-Hotstar-an-Indian-Company-What-is-the-technology-stack-used-by-Hotstar
6. https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/
7. https://www.i2k2.com/blog/future-for-data-centers-in-india/
8. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8089150/