Uniting global football fans with an XMPP geocluster
When you are running one of the top sport brands, launching a new innovative app always means it comes with great expectations from your fans.
That’s why highly recognised brands turn to ProcessOne. They need to be sure that the project will launch in time, will perform well and will not collapse under the load, no matter what happens.
In early 2014, a top brand contacted us with a clear and ambitious project. We had 6 months to develop and host the infrastructure for a large-scale realtime communication and messaging project. The deadline was not flexible. The app needed to be live just before the FIFA World Cup in Brazil.
ProcessOne worked with the customer mobile team to help them accelerate their development. XMPP can be a complex protocol and if you wish to launch with a tight deadline, you need to take a “fast lane” approach and get help directly from experts.
We also had to host the project, providing low-latency for connection and messaging everywhere in the world. We deployed a geocluster, handling a single XMPP domain in four data centers across the world. We operated our deployment in 4 AWS regions: USA to serve North America, Brazil to serve South America, Singapour to serve Asia and Ireland to serve Europe.
We used our custom Erlang component to deploy a geocluster at scale, handling ourselves all database synchronization across regions and auto-recovery in case of netsplits.
The application was ready just in time to handle the load of fans installing and trying the app. Soon after the launch we had to handle an unexpected 10x peak load when Cristiano Rolnaldo, with tens of millions of followers, retweeted about the app — and the platform handled it without a flinch!
With a 100% uptime, the project was a success, and the app gathered hundreds of thousands of football fans from all over the world. Did you guess which brand it was?
Areas of expertise:
- Realtime messaging
- Push notifications
- Platform management / hosting
Technologies:
