Case Study: Viasat achieves improved analytics performance and consistent I/O throughput with Amazon Web Services (Amazon EBS)

Viasat Boosts Analytics Performance Using Amazon EBS

Viasat, a global satellite communications provider, faced a data‑management challenge: its diverse business units and wide variety of hardware produced nonstandardized, high‑volume telemetry (about 250 MB/sec) that caused latency spikes and hurt responsiveness of time‑series dashboards and other analytics. The analytics team needed a unified, high‑throughput pipeline to collect, standardize, and make data available for monitoring, security, customer care, and capacity planning.

Viasat built Databus on AWS—using Kafka on Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS st1 volumes—to ingest and standardize 10–12 TB of daily data (storing ~2 TB after deduplication). Moving from instance storage to EBS st1 smoothed I/O, improved dashboard availability, maximized instance I/O utilization, reduced replication overhead (from three replicas to two), sped maintenance via attachable volumes, and lowered storage cost, with plans to migrate more workloads (including Hadoop) to st1.

ViaSat

Daniel Woodlins

Software Engineer