Case Study of SoundCloud's Archiecture

1. SoundCloud’s Architecture
Ngo Nguyen Chinh
Ha Noi 2016

2. Overview

3. Web Server
• The early days of SoundCloud, using Apache to serve the image/style/behavior
resources
• Then, replaced Apache with Nginx and reduced a web tier’s conguration
complexity

4. Load distribution
• HAProxy was added into SoundCloud infrastructure, and it entered as Queuing
Load Balancer
• Apply queue theory to solve “head of the line blocking”

5. Going Asynchronous
• Coordinating these subsystems, SoundCloud need some middleware that would
reliably queue, acknowledge and re-delivery job tickes on failure
• Using AMQP, implemeted by RabbitMQ

6. Caching
• Using Memcached to alleviate IO contention in the database like most
applications
• Add Varnish to handle backend partially rendered template caching and mostly
read-only APU responses

7. Dashboard
• Chose Cassandra as the storage system for the Dashboard index

8. Search
• Using Elastic Search for managing index storage

9. Notifications and Stats
•

10. References
https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/evolution-of-soundclouds-architecture

11. Thanks!