Case Study: SoundCloud achieves rapid, scalable analytics on billions of events with Amazon Redshift

SoundCloud - Customer Case Study

SoundCloud is a global audio platform for creators and listeners that receives about 12 hours of uploaded audio every minute, must transcode and store files in multiple formats, and logs and analyzes billions of events daily. With 2.5 PB of data and highly inconsistent, worldwide usage spikes, reliable, scalable storage and processing were critical to avoid catastrophic outages and let the team focus on the product.

SoundCloud moved storage and processing to AWS, using Amazon S3 for distribution and Amazon Glacier for durable backup (about 2.5 PB on Glacier), a burstable EC2 transcoding cluster of up to 300 instances to handle variable loads, and Amazon Redshift for analytics. The result is secure, scalable long-term storage, reduced operational overhead, fast provisioning for dev/test, and the ability to handle spikes and grow without owning infrastructure.

SoundCloud

Alexander Gross

VP of Engineering