Preparing for large-scale live streaming events on AWS — Part 1

This article provides a comprehensive guide for preparing large-scale live streaming events on AWS, covering strategy, architecture evaluation, and capacity planning to handle massive concurrent traffic surges.

• Large-scale event traffic differs from normal workloads with extreme concurrency spikes, predictable scheduling, and independent authentication surges
• Run AWS Well-Architected Framework reviews focusing on reliability and performance efficiency pillars
• Implement multi-region active-active deployment, service isolation, graceful degradation, and stateless compute patterns
• Pre-provision capacity using Load Balancer Capacity Unit Reservations and On-Demand Capacity Reservations rather than relying on auto scaling alone
• Pre-warm databases, caches, and NAT gateways; scale RDS read replicas and ElastiCache clusters to peak beforehand
• Raise service quotas weeks in advance and follow a 12-16 week preparation timeline with defined milestones
• Shape demand through pre-event programming, early subscriber campaigns, and progressive feature loading

Successful large-scale event delivery requires multimonth planning across architecture, capacity, cross-team coordination, and business strategy rather than relying on reactive auto scaling.