Airtel Digital Ltd Lowers Compute Spend for Music Streaming Service by 70% Using AWS

Airtel Digital Ltd. (ADL) is the digital subsidiary of Bharti Airtel, a multinational telecommunications company based in India. The market for ADL services in India continues to grow, with the value of the country’s internet-driven economy expected to be worth $1 trillion by 2030. As a result, ADL is rapidly developing new services for consumers and businesses and enhancing existing ones.

To drive innovation at scale and improve performance, ADL uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run the applications behind its offerings, ranging from a data-driven advertising platform and an omnichannel contact center to a data analytics infrastructure for customer insights.

The business continues to work closely with AWS to deploy new software and services into its cloud environments to optimize costs and improve the customer experience. This collaboration spans all ADL digital services, including Wynk Music, a music streaming service. Hitesh Bhatia, associate vice president of DevOps at Wynk Music says, “Our relationship works so well because AWS understands our goal of improving operations and freeing up resources for development.”

In 2021, Wynk Music rearchitected its applications to run in microservices-based containerized environments, with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to scale scheduled Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. It then moved from Amazon EC2 On-Demand instances to Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, which resulted in a reduction of about 10–15 percent on computing costs.

In 2022, Wynk Music migrated from a legacy autoscaling solution that was limiting Amazon EC2 Spot Instances adoption due to latency. It transitioned to Karpenter, a Kubernetes autoscaling solution that would simplify operations, maximize compute utilization, and reduce scheduling latencies. During the transition, Wynk Music personnel worked closely with AWS Solutions Architects and its Enterprise Support Technical Account Manager (TAM) to ensure best practices and to minimize risk. Comments Bhatia, “We deployed Karpenter successfully after our engineering team and AWS Enterprise Support worked together to fine-tune our architecture.”

Wynk Music also migrated multiple Amazon EKS workloads to Amazon EC2 Instances powered by AWS Graviton Processors. As a result, it consolidated the cluster behind its mission-critical Aerospike database by more than 66 percent—from 48 Intel virtual CPUs (vCPUs) to 12 Graviton vCPUs, reducing the instance size from m5.4xlarge to m6g.xlarge. In addition, the team saw latency for Aerospike reduced by around 20–25 percent and costs drop by 75 percent.

Over time, Wynk Music migrated 30 percent of its total workloads to Graviton-based Amazon EC2 Instances, reducing computing costs by 70 percent and lowering expenses for API services by 47 percent. “When one-third of our cost is allocated to Amazon EC2 instances, opting for AWS Graviton-based instances was a logical step due to its superior performance and cost-effectiveness,” says Bhatia.

In 2023, Wynk Music increased the performance of its big data analytics platform, which monitors user sessions for its 75 million monthly active customers. It replaced its Amazon EMR environment by transitioning from Amazon EC2 to Amazon EKS, utilizing Karpenter for provisioning and scaling. It also moved the platform to AWS Graviton, lowering analytics costs by 60 percent. Most recently, the company has migrated ScyllaDB, Kafka, ELK stack, Solr, and MongoDB workloads to AWS Graviton. “We’ve seen performance improvements across the board and made AWS Graviton part of our default setup for data service,” states Bhatia.

Furthermore, in collaboration with ADL, the Enterprise Support TAM implemented a strategic fortnightly cost-centric cadence, incorporating insights from Amazon EC2 Spot instances and AWS Graviton usage into a custom cost dashboard. These initiatives have resulted in substantial cost efficiencies, helping ADL effectively optimize the value of its technological investments.

Through optimization of its AWS infrastructure, Wynk Music has reduced costs per user by 20 percent, freeing up additional resources for continued development of its machine learning and data analytics capabilities, which recommend music to listeners. “By using AWS, we continue to increase the personalization of our recommendations to help retain customers and attract new ones,” says Bhatia.

Despite continued growth, the company remains aligned to its objective of sustainable IT. Through AWS Graviton, the business is consolidating clusters, reducing energy consumption, and increasing performance. “All business units across Airtel Digital take their environmental responsibilities seriously,” says Bhatia, “Using AWS, we can continuously raise the bar on sustainable innovation.”