Uplive Case Study

A flagship product of Asia Innovations Group, Uplive is one of the world’s largest independent video social entertainment platforms with more than 300million registered users from over 150 regions as of the end of 2021. Launched in July 2016, Uplive rapidly expanded operations to Asia-Pacific, Middle East and North Africa, North America, Latin America, and other global hubs.

 

Uplive has set up branch offices around the globe to operate locally and boasts a strong and sophisticated product development team. Uplive allows live video hosts to showcase their talents, share their lifestyles, and build connections in real time with users across the world. Twitter recognized Uplive as one of the most influential international brands in 2019, and the company continues to lead and innovate in the entertainment and new economy domains.

Uplive is positioned as a video social entertainment platform for global users, offering everything from live streaming to instant messaging (IM) and online shopping. Incorporating gaming and social networking into live streams and providing real-time translation across multiple languages help break space, time, and communication barriers between global users; this is also what makes Uplive products stand out from the competition.

 

Accompanying the rapidly expanding business are challenges such as exponential growth in data volume and demand for high system availability and global scalability. How to better serve its global users and provide a great user experience is Uplive’s most salient concern. In terms of technologies, building an IT infrastructure that aligns with business goals hinges upon the ability to freely scale services globally, ensure maximum availability of the application systems and business continuity, and meet security and compliance requirements for offshore data.

 

As Uplive grows, it has been periodically evaluating the offerings of the major cloud service providers. From a business perspective, Uplive places high priority on the stability of the underlying IT infrastructures, evaluating whether they can reliably support its long-term ambitions.

 

AWS has been the most important hosting platform for the Uplive app since its launch in 2016. According to Mingling Liu, CTO of Uplive, AWS was chosen for the following three reasons:

 

First, cutting-edge product and service offerings and wide infrastructure coverage allow Uplive to innovate quickly and easily to serve its growing global user base. AWS offers an extensive selection of customizable and user-friendly managed services, which seamlessly dock with and support the Uplive product team in terms of operating systems, programming languages, and web application platforms. This has freed the team from managing the complexities of the underlying system architectures to focus on business innovation. System maintenance has also become much easier compared with self-built solutions.

 

Second, for every milestone product update on Uplive’s end, AWS offers tailored product architecture and services that at once meet the new operational parameters and enable continuous cost optimizations. For example, Amazon DynamoDB was employed soon after the launch of Uplive’s IM app to handle the high concurrent read/write requests, providing a minimum five-fold performance increase over the in-house MongoDB setup. Building on , Amazon Redshift, Uplive has tapped into the data analytics functions of Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK), to support operational decisions and user experience upgrades. Lastly, the company has also switched from Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to Amazon Aurora for its core database platform to take advantage of the latter’s powerful features.

 

“When choosing our technologies, we did a detailed comparison of almost all mainstream databases on the market. We found Aurora and DynamoDB to be a perfect fit for us, and were especially impressed by their price-to-performance ratio,” said Liu. “In particular, they allow our development team to remain essentially agnostic to the underlying system architecture, which is critical to achieving the fast-paced innovations demanded by web applications.”

 

Third, through AWS’ enterprise-class technical support, Uplive has access to technical experts and experienced engineers around the clock who can help Uplive to properly use the tools at its disposal and manage the IT environment itself. AWS also advises Uplive on its specific applications and use scenarios to optimize the system architecture. Furthermore, the AWS team has assigned Uplive a technical manager to coordinate resources and connect its team with technology specialists who can develop tailored optimization plans.

 

Empowered by AWS, Uplive continues to deliver innovation and better experiences to its global users.

 

When Uplive first launched its products, it mainly relied on the basic AWS products—Amazon EC2, Amazon CloudFront, and AWS WAF—to enable secure, local access to services for users worldwide. Notably, DynamoDB helped Uplive to cope with traffic spikes with aplomb, as the company no longer needed to worry about how high the data volume could reach or devote development and maintenance resources to database partitioning and sharding as in traditional environments. In high concurrency read/write scenarios that create transient dataflows, such as for syncing offline messages, DynamoDB can still keep the latency to milliseconds.

 

Later, Uplive built a data lake architecture, together with autoscaling features such as that enabled by Spot instances, for further cost and efficiency improvements. Based on this architecture, Uplive has now created a complete data analytics and decision system that informs marketing and operational teams through near-real time data reports and full data visualization functionalities. This finer-grained management in turn enables Uplive to take the user experience “up a notch.”

 

As its global user base ballooned and new applications emerged, Uplive started to look for a core database service with better performance, lower running costs, and more user-friendly development support. The AWS team pointed the company to Aurora, which offers a wealth of powerful features such as compute/storage separation, multi-copy synchronization, instance read/write split, and high concurrency support. After an in-depth comparison with other relational databases including MySQL and PostgreSQL, the Uplive team found that Aurora could offer a minimum 3-5x performance gain under general workloads, and up to a ten-fold improvement in certain scenarios. For this reason, Uplive accelerated migrating its core business modules to Aurora, a decision that has greatly improved the reliability of its data and applications.

 

Following this migration, Uplive further tapped into Aurora Global Database for its multi-region data replication and disaster recovery functions. With this quick and cost-effective product, Uplive has achieved high availability for its entire system and set up multiple data processing centers for maximum business continuity. It can quickly rebuild its systems even following extreme scenarios.

 

AWS has allowed Uplive to develop a complete operations framework, an insightful data analytics and operational decision support system, and continuously improving cost optimization approaches. Amazon CloudWatch enables product developers and maintenance personnel to see changes in cloud resources in advance, and thus optimize instance selections and match resources with anticipated workload as early as possible. Aurora’s Performance Insights gives the team the ability to monitor database performance, define optimization areas, and predict and allocate resources accordingly to efficiently respond to potential workload spikes and achieve operational goals.

 

The AWS team has been involved in every stage of Uplive’s architectural refactoring, providing tools, methodologies, and industry best practices throughout its product development cycles to help it do more with less and become a leading global video social entertainment platform.