Case Study: SoundCloud achieves real-time, scalable search for 30 million users with Elastic

SoundCloud - Customer Case Study

SoundCloud, the world’s leading social sound platform serving some 30 million users, needed a flexible, easy-to-use real-time search to help listeners and creators find sounds instantly. Their legacy Solr-based search struggled with speed, scalability and complexity as the site and business rules grew, making immediate discoverability and rapid feature rollout impossible.

SoundCloud migrated to Elasticsearch to provide real-time indexing, universal “search as navigation” and contextual suggestions, plus an Explore section to guide users. The move cut time-to-searchability from days to about three seconds, simplified feature development and node maintenance via REST/JSON, and delivered unified metrics for better decision-making—resulting in faster innovation, improved search relevance and a much better user experience.

SoundCloud

Alexander Gross

VP of Engineering