Stream come true — Znipe improves startup times by 41% and stalls per hour by 32% with Fastly 

Engaging. Exciting. Ecstatic. True fans know esports are every bit as thrilling as their mainstream counterparts. And Swedish-based Znipe specializes in delighting esports fans with amazing streaming experiences, bringing them right into the heart of the action — as the world’s top pros battle it out in breath-taking matchups.

With immersive and intuitive viewing experiences and rich data creating deeper relationships and innovative media streams for industry partners, Znipe’s platform handles 1.8 PB of (mostly events-based) traffic per month, while elevating esports to a sustainable entertainment ecosystem.

But delivering smooth, high-spec esports streaming to fans worldwide is much more challenging than a normal website serving users in Sweden or Europe alone. The high bandwidth and low latency requirements of global synchronized live streaming puts it top of the complexity scale. Therefore as Znipe scales to support events and viewers around the world, it needed an elegant CDN and edge solution to two key problems that could seriously jeopardize success: origin offload and playback performance.

Origin offload and playback performance — the keys to success 

“We had an average origin offload of 98.5-99.5%, but our previous origin offload solution was still a black box with varying performance depending on traffic volumes. In the US primarily we were facing reports of playback failing when watching multiple streams in sync (one of our core features).” 

Patrik Åkerfeldt, CTO, Znipe 

The first obstacle was tackling origin offload. Average origin offload was originally 96-97%, improving to 98.5-99.5% after enabling an additional origin offload solution with the previous CDN vendor. So although the immediate problem was solved, performance remained inconsistent according to traffic volumes and ironing this out seemed impossible because the legacy solution felt like an impenetrable ‘black box’.

Meanwhile, playback performance was also a concern. As Znipe CTO Patrik Åkerfeldt explains, “One issue we were facing, primarily in the US, was reports of playback working fine when watching one stream but starting to fail when viewing multiple streams in sync (one of our core features). Due to internal details of our synchronization logic, this issue presented itself in cases where the user had high bandwidth but relatively high latency to our video segments.”

While working in the background to make their logic more robust, Znipe found a quicker way to mitigate the playback performance issue which was to introduce a regional shield in Miami (dubbed the ‘Atlantic Offload’) to concentrate traffic from the Americas, reducing round trips across the Atlantic.

To offer customers flexibility and meet the tough demands of esports streaming, Znipe has avoided vendor lock-in and taken a multi-CDN approach. However, various playback performance issues in Asia (primarily South Korea and Japan) over the years have eventually led to the recent deployment of another regional shield in Singapore, similar to that in Miami.

Fastly fit

“Moving away from our previous offload solution is essentially a result of adding Fastly as part of our multi-CDN initiative. We quickly found out that what Fastly is offering out of the box is on par with the origin offload efficiency we see with our previous CDN vendor and offload solution. There is simply no reason to pay extra for this feature.” 

Patrik Åkerfeldt, CTO, Znipe 

Znipe’s stack comprises several elements. As Patrik Åkerfeldt explains: 

“We primarily operate in AWS, where we run our production and staging k8s clusters. Our video pipeline infrastructure is divided between AWS Elemental and Znipe's proprietary solutions. Every day, we source hundreds of millions of events into our data pipeline in GCP, utilizing Pub/Sub, Dataflow, and BigQuery. Part of this data includes CDN logs, client playback events, broadcast production events."

Patrik had first encountered Fastly when he previously worked with Spotify. Although he didn’t work in the team directly integrating CDNs, he heard great things through the grapevine and had remained curious ever since. This prior knowledge of Fastly CDN made the decision to run a trial easier, although some nerves remained. 

"I wouldn’t say we were scared, but we were hesitant to try something new,” says Patrik. “Our main CDN at the time was very well-known and popular in the streaming space, so we wanted proof points to ensure we wouldn’t degrade our experience. Fastly encouraged us to try their service and assured us we wouldn’t be disappointed. After giving it a shot, I can confidently say we were not. I’m particularly impressed by the request-collapsing feature; while I can’t speak for other CDNs, what I see with Fastly truly stands out. It works seamlessly right out of the box, without needing to pay for extra features or implement any complicated setups — aside from possibly placing a media shield in front of your origin, which is no big deal."

Znipe now ships all live streaming through the Fastly CDN with an origin shield in Stockholm and two region shields in Miami and Singapore to further improve playback performance in those regions.

Flexibility is still key to Znipe’s approach, and Fastly has quickly become indispensable.

As Patrik explains, “with the addition of another CDN vendor, we are less vulnerable to issues as we can quickly switch back and forth. Seeing that Fastly provides as good an offload as our previous solution, we can now cut our costs by sticking with Fastly and cease paying for the legacy service. It might very well be that we keep using Fastly as an origin shield even for traffic delivered by another CDN vendor going forward. 

Using Varnish, we can control our delivery behavior to a much larger degree than previously, allowing us to mitigate performance issues by, for example, deploying regional shields without being dependent on the CDN vendor to help us set things up. Overall, we feel that Fastly is much less of a black box than other vendors.” 

But that’s not all, because Znipe is also bolstered by Fastly Compute. Developing a new feature flag service in-house meant introducing another endpoint where requests couldn’t simply be cached globally. So Znipe uses Fastly Compute to evaluate those feature flags at the edge, while still keeping request flags down.

The graphs below outline the stunning improvements after Znipe deployed its Atlantic Shield:  

• Brazil startup time improved by 41% 

• US startup time improved by 28% 

• Median US startup time improved by 25% 

• US stalls per hour improved by 15% 

• Brazil stalls per hour improved by 32%

The Sankey graph below shows CDN cache misses and the destinations those requests are heading for. You see the new Singapore Regions Shield in action (deployed September 2024) and the exceptions DXB and FJR (denoted as Middle East) that go straight to Europe.

Let the games begin 

Results so far are extremely encouraging. And while Znipe remains vendor-agnostic, there’s every chance its Fastly partnership may grow. For instance, it’s considering more compute-at-edge services for endpoints that can’t be cached in the CDN, like play token generation.  

Whatever happens, it’s a joy helping Znipe bring esports to an ever-growing global audience.