Case Study: SoundCloud achieves real-time searchable content for millions of users with Elastic Elasticsearch

SoundCloud makes content searchable in real time for 30,000,000 users with Elastic

SoundCloud, a leading social sound platform, needed to overhaul its search infrastructure to create a flexible, real-time search engine for its tens of millions of users. The challenge was to replace their existing Apache Solr system, which could not scale easily or make new content searchable immediately, hindering their ability to deliver relevant results and roll out new features quickly. They turned to the vendor Elastic, implementing Elasticsearch to address these issues.

Elastic provided the solution with Elasticsearch, enabling SoundCloud to make user-uploaded sounds searchable in real-time, whereas updates previously took days. The new infrastructure gave SoundCloud a stable, scalable platform with a clear path for massive growth, drastically improving development velocity. According to SoundCloud's VP of Engineering, the redesign was an unqualified success, allowing the team to experiment quickly and deliver a powerful search-as-navigation experience to their global user base.

SoundCloud