Case Study: SoundCloud achieves scalable, secure 2.5 PB audio storage and on-demand transcoding with Amazon Web Services

SoundCloud - Customer Case Study

SoundCloud is a global audio platform that lets artists, podcasters, and listeners upload, share, and stream content across web and mobile; the service ingests about 12 hours of audio every minute, transcodes files into multiple formats, logs billions of events daily, and stores petabytes of data while coping with highly variable, worldwide traffic spikes. Ensuring uninterrupted, scalable storage and processing was critical—any storage failure would threaten the service and distract the team from its core product.

To solve this, SoundCloud moved storage and processing to AWS: audio files are served from Amazon S3 with backups to Amazon Glacier (about 2.5 PB archived), transcoding is handled by up to 300 Amazon EC2 instances during peaks, and analytics run on Amazon Redshift. The result is reliable, scalable infrastructure with lower operational overhead, faster testing and development, and the ability to scale compute and storage on demand so the team can focus on the product.

SoundCloud

Alexander Gross

VP of Engineering