GOStack successfully migrated the backend for the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) official mobile app from Microsoft Azure to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The new platform, built on Amazon EKS, is designed to handle the extreme, read-heavy peak loads of the IIHF World Championships, supporting up to 100,000 requests per second while ensuring cost-efficiency and zero disruptions for fans.
OVERVIEW
Information
- Client: International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF)
- Industry: Sports, Media, Live Events
- Project Type: Cloud Migration (Azure to AWS), DevOps Transformation, High-Traffic Backend
- Services: AWS EKS, DocumentDB, RDS, API Gateway, Lambda, CloudFront, WAF, ElastiCache for Redis, GitOps, Infrastructure as Code, Observability
Intro
The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) is the worldwide governing body for ice hockey and inline hockey. Their official mobile app is the primary digital touchpoint for millions of fans during the IIHF World Championships, providing live scores, stats, news and video. The app experiences massive, sudden traffic spikes during major games, creating a demanding, read-heavy environment that requires extreme scalability and resilience.
Previously hosted on Microsoft Azure, the app’s backend infrastructure struggled to cope with these championship peak loads. GOStack was engaged to migrate the entire backend to AWS, with the core objective of building a platform that could handle 100,000 requests per second without disruptions, while also implementing modern DevOps practices and maintaining cost-efficiency.
The Challenge
The IIHF’s mobile app backend presented a classic high-traffic event challenge, amplified by the global passion for ice hockey.
Extreme Peak Loads: During key moments of the World Championships, traffic to the app backend would surge to 100,000 requests per second. The existing Azure infrastructure was not architected to handle these sudden, massive and read-heavy spikes, leading to performance degradation and potential outages.
Cost Inefficiency: The previous setup was not optimised for the highly variable nature of the traffic. It incurred high costs during off-peak periods while still failing to deliver the required performance during championships.
Lack of Modern DevOps: The deployment and management processes were not fully automated, making it difficult to respond quickly to issues or to scale the infrastructure effectively during live events.
Resilience and Observability: The platform needed to be self-healing and provide deep observability to ensure that any issues could be identified and resolved instantly, without impacting the fan experience. Zero downtime during a championship game is non-negotiable.
Our Solution
GOStack designed and built a new, highly scalable and resilient backend platform on AWS, architected specifically for the extreme demands of the IIHF World Championships.
Migration to Amazon EKS: The application was dockerized and migrated to Amazon EKS, providing a robust and scalable foundation. To manage costs and ensure performance, we implemented a mixed-instance strategy, using a combination of EC2 Spot and On-Demand instances, allowing the platform to scale cost-effectively to meet the 100k RPS demand.
High-Performance, Read-Heavy Data Layer: The data architecture was designed for high-throughput reads. Amazon DocumentDB and Amazon RDS provide the primary data storage, while Amazon ElastiCache for Redis delivers an in-memory caching layer to absorb the immense read pressure and provide millisecond latency for live scores and stats.
GitOps and Infrastructure as Code: The entire infrastructure is managed as code using Terraform, with a GitOps workflow powered by ArgoCD. This enables fully automated, version-controlled deployments and provides the IIHF team with a self-service model for managing their infrastructure.
Strong Observability and Self-Healing: We implemented a comprehensive observability stack, providing deep insights into the performance of the application and infrastructure. The EKS cluster is configured for self-healing, automatically replacing unhealthy pods and nodes to ensure continuous availability.
Global Performance and Security: Amazon CloudFront delivers the app’s content globally with low latency, while AWS WAF protects the backend from malicious traffic and DDoS attacks, a critical requirement for such a high-profile application.
Results and Benefits
Massive Scalability: The new platform has been proven to handle the 100,000 requests per second peak load of the World Championships without any performance degradation.
Cost-Efficiency: The use of mixed Spot and On-Demand instances, combined with a scalable architecture, has resulted in a highly cost-effective solution that scales down automatically during off-peak periods.
Zero-Downtime Operations: The combination of a resilient architecture, strong observability and self-healing capabilities ensures that the app remains available and performant, even in the face of extreme traffic.
Developer Autonomy: The GitOps workflow and self-service platform have empowered the IIHF’s development team, allowing them to operate more independently and deploy updates with confidence.
Transformation Impact
By migrating their official app backend to AWS, the IIHF has secured the digital experience for millions of ice hockey fans worldwide. The platform is no longer a source of risk during major championships but a stable, scalable and cost-efficient asset. The modern DevOps practices implemented by GOStack have also transformed how their team works, enabling greater agility and a stronger focus on delivering new features for fans. The IIHF is now perfectly positioned to continue growing its digital presence, confident that its infrastructure can handle whatever the future of global sports entertainment demands.
About GOStack
GOStack is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner specialising in platform modernisation, DevOps, GitOps and data analytics on AWS. We help technology companies replace legacy infrastructure with modern, scalable and cost-efficient cloud platforms. We also embed the engineering practices that make those platforms sustainable long-term.
Why Partner with Us for High-Traffic Events?
Handling the extreme peak loads of a global live event requires more than just cloud infrastructure; it requires a deep understanding of resilient architecture, cost-optimisation strategies and the operational discipline to ensure zero downtime. We have a proven track record of building platforms for the world’s most demanding high-traffic scenarios. If your application needs to perform flawlessly under pressure, let’s talk. Contact us to start your cloud journey.
