Samsung scales up for the biggest live TV event in U.S. history

Samsung scales with Amazon CloudFront 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 halftime show. The challenge was huge: 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 U.S. history?

Onica by Rackspace Technology® 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 by Rackspace Technology partnered with Samsung’s developers to model this traffic load in the weeks leading up to the big game. This ambitious project required developers to write the code needed for Samsung’s Smart TVs, and infrastructure specialists needed to build a scalable and elastic infrastructure that could handle 4,000,000 concurrent connections.

Big traffic, big data

As part of this project, Onica by Rackspace Technology worked with our Amazon partners to monitor traffic internally and view testing and production in real time. Having seen the solution successfully make more than 500,000 connections per second during the game, Amazon now uses this case study as an example of just what its cloud infrastructure can accomplish.

Additionally, Onica by Rackspace Technology leveraged the power of big data through AWS. At the peak of the Super Bowl, around 2.4 million Smart TVs 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 an Amazon Kinesis Data Stream, which was then 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.

Largely due to big data capabilities on AWS, Samsung delivered live feedback and data from more than 6.5 million Smart TVs over the course of the game. Through our ongoing partnership with Samsung, Onica by Rackspace Technology has been able to move more than 40 applications into AWS.