Scalable Emoji Broadcasting System - Hotstar

Hotstar first introduced Sports Bar in 2019. In the world cup 2019, 5 Billion Emojis from 55.83 Million users during the ICC Cricket World Cup 2019.

Hotstar main aim was to convert the sounds and responses in the live cricket ground. These are nothing but audience reactions in a digital way of expressing emotions. Showing the mood of the audience and displaying the changing moods in real-time is challenging when you plan to receive billions of such emoji submissions during a tournament.

Functional Requirements

1. Users can browse and select stickers during live cricket matches found in the sports bar.

2. Stickers can be sent over a live

3. Stickers appear instantly in the live chat interface.

Non-Functional Requirements

1. High availability to support concurrent users during peak traffic.

2. Low latency for real-time sticker delivery.

3. Secure transmission and storage of sticker data.

4. Scalable infrastructure to accommodate increasing user base and traffic.

Key Design Principles

Scalability: Increase the resources with increase in traffic. Hotstar achieved this by using the horizontal scaling with load balancers and auto scaling of the resources configured

Decomposition: Breaking into small components and each being allowed to do the particular task independent of each other.

Asynchronous: Process execution should not block the resources and provides high concurrency.

Envelope Calculations

Assume the scenario of World cup 2019, Target was to scale upto 5 Billion Emojis from 55.83 Million users over 48 Matches.

Total users would be around 55.83 Million users, lets do some assumption by considering 20% of the total users are active. So the number of concurrent users are 0.2 * 55.83 which is around 11.166 Million users.

Now let's do some calculations on the emojis.

Total Emojis received: 5 Billions

Average Emoji's Per Match: 5,000,000,000 / 48 ~ 104166667 emojis per match.

Each match duration is 3 hours

Number of Emojis per hour: 104166667 / 3 = 34722222.3

Number of Emojis per second: 34722222.3 / 3600 = 9645.06175 ~ 9646 emojis per second

Storage Calculations

Now lets calculate the size of the emoji data we need to store:

{
  "emoji_id": "a32cb3ad-b7ad-4b38-b213-84a9c6365aca",
  "user_id": "62c9fdb6-c833-4cce-a2fa-faddefa36a69",
  "timestamp": "2024-07-15T12:34:56Z",
  "emoji_type": "animation",
  "message_id": "c2459179-4585-4f7a-b287-1e52ecf895cf",
  "recipient_id": "5bd0f171-862a-4ed9-9f3a-523314ae7598",
  "channel_id": "b8f8d727-b29e-4ac6-aac4-6224e4c91c35",
  "event_id": "b029d956-98da-4109-8334-4515d9e81214",
  "metadata": {
    "reaction": "cheer",
    "emotion": "happy"
  }
}

Size of the emoji data is 230 B

Total Emojis per second: 9646

Total increase in memory size per second: 9646 * 230 = 2218580 Bytes = 2.21 MB

Every match we need almost 2.21 * 3600 * 3 = 23.89 GB of data

Entire World it needs 23.89 * 48 = 1146.72 GB ~ 1.2 TB

For the world cup total data for the emojis would be around 1.2 TB

System Components

Hotstar defined the technologies in the blog mentioned in the references:

Capturing a billion EmojisDisney+ Hotstar

Scalable Emoji Broadcasting system, world cup - Hotstar

• Client Side Components:

  • HTTP API: Clients send user-submitted emojis via HTTP requests.

  • Local Buffer: To handle asynchronous message sending.

• Service Side Components:

  • Golang Producer: Handles asynchronous message production to Kafka using Goroutines and Channels.

  • Python Consumer: Consumes processed data from Kafka and normalizes it.

• Databases: The system primarily relies on Kafka for message queuing and PubSub for data delivery and NoSql to store the user profile information and subscriptions.

• Cache: Not required, since the data to be handled in the real time

• Load Balancers: Distribute incoming API requests across multiple servers for horizontal scalability

• Message Queues:

  • Kafka: Used for high throughput, availability, and low latency message queuing.

  • Knol: Hotstar's data platform built on Kafka.

• API Gateways:

  • HTTP API Gateway: Manages incoming API requests from clients

• Configuration Management:

  • Configuration Files: Used in Golang producer and Spark streaming jobs for flush intervals, batch durations, etc.

• Monitoring and Logging:

  • Monitoring Tools: Likely in place to monitor the health and performance of Kafka, Spark jobs, and PubSub.

  • Logging: Implemented in Golang producer, Kafka, and PubSub for debugging and auditing purposes.

• Authentication and Authorization

  • API Security: Ensure secure client-server communication.

  • Access Control: Managed for Kafka, PubSub, and other internal components.

• Scalability and Reliability:

  • Horizontal Scalability: Achieved with load balancers and auto-scaling mechanisms.

  • Reliability: Ensured through Kafka's fault-tolerance and replication features.

• Networking:

  • Internal Network: Ensures secure communication between various components (API gateway, Kafka, Spark, PubSub).

  • External Network: Handles client interactions securely

• DevOps and CI/CD

  • CI/CD Pipeline: Automates testing, deployment, and updates for various components (Golang producer, Spark jobs).

  • Infrastructure as Code: Manages infrastructure deployment and scaling.

• Analytics and Reporting

  • Real-Time Metrics: Captured by Spark jobs and monitored by internal tools.

  • Usage Statistics: Analyzed to measure user engagement and system performance.

• Data Processing

  • Spark Streaming: Processes and aggregates data in real-time.

  • Golang Producer: Manages asynchronous message production.

  • Kafka Consumer: Normalizes data and sends it to PubSub.

References

https://blog.hotstar.com/capturing-a-billion-emojis-62114cc0b440 https://blog.hotstar.com/building-pubsub-for-50m-concurrent-socket-connections-5506e3c3dabf https://blog.scottlogic.com/2018/04/17/comparing-big-data-messaging.html https://blog.hotstar.com/data-democratisation-hotstar-93ebfb1e688d https://medium.com/@chandanbaranwal/spark-streaming-vs-flink-vs-storm-vs-kafka-streams-vs-samza-choose-your-stream-processing-91ea3f04675b https://www.debugbear.com/json-size-analyzer https://blog.hotstar.com/hotstars-journey-from-ec2-to-containers-86ea4e4880fd https://newsletter.systemdesign.one/p/hotstar-architecture