Cricket is the second most popular sport worldwide. Beloved across the globe, the scale and passion of its fans is unrivalled. Even in the US there is an estimated 30 million Cricket fans, who knew? The pinnacle of passion for Cricket is in India, where our friends at Hotstar bring Cricket to their 150-200 million user-base in India and to the Indian diaspora.
A Cricket match at times can be long and slow, sometimes even slower than baseball, but can quickly change in an "over" or with a single "ball." With the unpredictability of live-sport and users’ viewing habits, there are spikes, both up and down that need to be rapidly met. For Hotstar this can mean needing to add 1.1 million new users / minute.
It requires more than just an "on paper exercise" dimensioning for peak loads. Hotstar model the user-journey, simulate at “Million Scale” the user-journey, and add chaos engineering to gracefully manage potential failures to ensure a great overall user-experience. In addition to this video, there is also this blog article on how they run “Million scale” simulations