Hopin Decreases Latency by 20% and Improves Scalability Using Amazon IVS

As a leading shared experiences solution, Hopin needed to scale rapidly when the COVID-19 pandemic increased the demand for virtual events around the globe. In 2 years, Hopin grew from a team of eight to a fully remote company of over 1,000 employees with 100,000 customers using its solution for virtual, hybrid, and in-person events.

When its former cloud vendor could no longer handle the increased scale of events with this rapid growth, Hopin looked to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Using Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS), a managed live streaming solution for building engaging and interactive live streaming experiences, Hopin improved reliability, decreased database and cache latency by around 20 percent for a better playback experience, and expanded into new geographic regions.

Hopin’s Virtual Venue provides event organizers with everything they need to engage with their virtual or hybrid audiences, including live video stages, networking tools, and polls. It also supports onsite event technology for in-person and hybrid experiences. Founded in 2019, Hopin has grown quickly and globally by living out its mission to make the world feel closer—with its fully remote workforce using cloud computing technology. “We don’t need physical offices to make the world feel closer,” says Evelina Vrabie, engineering manager at Hopin. “Using well-established, secure, and scalable solutions like those on AWS makes this mission possible.”

Using its previous cloud provider, Hopin experienced reliability issues with the company’s growth and increase in demand. It needed to ask the vendor to increase its provisioned capacity whenever it hosted a large customer event, which took time and prevented a seamless experience for customers. Hopin implemented Amazon IVS in January 2021 because the fully hosted solution supported scalability along with more control over areas like storage, troubleshooting, and video stream management.

Using Amazon IVS, Hopin improved the playback experience of live events. Because the managed global infrastructure of Amazon IVS supports geographically dispersed broadcasters and viewers, Hopin can work with customers in new countries. “By using Amazon IVS, Hopin was able to expand into new regions because of this better playback experience, and it unlocked notable, revenue-driving deals,” says Vrabie.

Hopin also improved scalability and reliability, increasing event capacities and reducing its database and cache latency by around 20 percent. “Event organizers can deliver a broadcast to a larger audience because we can support stages with up to 100,000 viewers at the same time without issues,” says Vrabie. To further support scalability and lower latency, Hopin uses Amazon Aurora, a MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud that has the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases at a fraction of the cost. The company can host large and concurrent events without database capacity limitations because Aurora automatically grows storage up to 128 TB per database instance.

Hopin plans to continue expanding its use of Amazon IVS to improve accessibility and further reduce latency. “Amazon IVS is a solid service with a big infrastructure, so we can stream into many countries that we wouldn’t have been able to stream into before,” says Armando Garcia Mendoza, principal engineer at Hopin.