Watch now: HBO Max uses canaries on AWS for outside-in validation

Stand-alone streaming platform HBO Max entertains global audiences of all ages with HBO programing, blockbuster movies, and original content, with its international subscriber base topping 73 million. Responsible for building tools for operational visibility and fraud mitigation, HBO Max’s operational experience team created a solution for internal stakeholders to easily see the status of the overall experience. Using canaries, the team built a validation framework for outside-in monitoring from the customer’s point of view.

The HBO Max operational experience team builds canaries in Amazon CloudWatch, with artifacts saved in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Since internal stakeholders might not have access to the AWS Console, the team built a status page using AWS AppSync to provide a GraphQL interface for AWS Lambda; it pulls information from the canaries, including last run, historical runs, status, HAR file info, and screenshots, and exposes that data to the status page for internal consumption. Watch the video to learn more, including how canaries deploy to multiple regions.

AWS for Media & Entertainment has the most purpose-built capabilities of any cloud to help customers transform content production, media supply chain, broadcast, direct-to-consumer & streaming, and analytics. Explore https://aws.amazon.com/media/ to learn more.