IIHF Migrates Official App Backend from Azure to AWS to Handle Championship Peak Loads

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.

100,000 Requests Per Second and it Just Works

Our mobile app is heavily used during the championships. Fans deserve a flawless experience no matter how many are using it at once. GOStack enabled us to give fans what they deserve.

Martin Zöllner

Director of Technologies

IIHF