Case Study: Pretzel Tech achieves reliable, scalable streaming during extreme demand peaks with Heroku

Pretzel Tech Handles Extreme Peaks in Demand with a Multi-Platform Architecture Centered on Heroku

Pretzel Tech’s Pretzel Rocks is a DMCA‑safe music streaming service built for live streamers (Twitch, YouTube Gaming, etc.), providing continuous, licensed music for long streaming sessions. The company faces extreme, highly volatile demand—when a popular streamer goes live, traffic can jump from zero to hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users—so Pretzel needed an architecture that could serve streamers, viewers, and large media volumes without a big ops team.

Pretzel built a multi‑platform stack with a Heroku‑hosted Ruby on Rails API as the source of truth (Heroku Postgres, Redis, Resque and add‑ons like Scout and Papertrail), a React front end on Netlify and an Electron desktop client, while storing media on S3 and delivering it via the StackPath CDN. AWS API Gateway + Lambda cache “now playing” data for Twitch widgets to absorb extreme spikes, keeping Heroku stable and minimizing ops overhead; the result is a fast‑moving, resilient platform that handles large traffic bursts (example totals: ~15.98 TB bandwidth, ~9.6M requests, ~1.7M cached hits) and lets the small team focus on features.

Pretzel Tech

Nate Beck

Founder