Case Study: Sony Music achieves 630K unique visitors and flawless scaling with Google Cloud Platform

Sony Music builds app to support YouTube’s biggest-ever music livestream event with Google Cloud Platform

Sony Music needed a fast-built “second screen” app to accompany its massive One Direction Day YouTube livestream. With less than three weeks to deliver an interactive quiz that pushed questions every 10 minutes, awarded badges, and integrated Google+ — and with the expectation of sudden, large traffic spikes from a highly active fan base — the team required a platform that could scale reliably under heavy load.

Sony’s agency built the app in PHP on Google App Engine, using Cloud Datastore and dedicated Memcache for performance and automatic scaling. The solution handled an unexpected early traffic surge and a 12x spike during the event, delivering 630,000 unique visitors in 10 hours, peaking at 9,000 QPS with a low error rate, and supporting the livestream that reached 772,000 concurrent viewers and 10.7 million playbacks.

Sony Music

Genevieve Ampaduh

Head of Digital Marketing