The Hotstar X Journey – Half 1 – Why Rewrite?

That is the primary article in a sequence of blogs that can describe how we advanced the Hotstar platform to its subsequent era model.

The Disney+Hotstar platform is the biggest OTT supplier in India. The platform additionally powers the Disney+ app throughout international locations in MENA, SEA and the SAARC area.

The unique Hotstar platform (code-name Rocky) was evangelised and constructed 3 years in the past. Rocky was a real rockstar and it proved its mettle by means of a number of giant scale occasions and helped us scale for audacious objectives. Nevertheless, the ageing of the platform had now began to point out by means of the cracks. Rocky’s structure was inline with what a start-up would rightfully do: Shopper facet orchestration of enterprise logic, area apis straight uncovered over CDN (as an api gateway) that the consumer would straight invoke and a set of area providers that deal with varied issues like cataloging, funds, adverts, suggestions, and so on.

Because the Hotstar platform advanced for newer enterprise and buyer use-cases, we began to watch some key obstacles.

1. Lack of Buyer Delight Tempo : Each new characteristic launch or perhaps a easy A/B experiment to activate/off some options required consumer app releases. The tempo at which we wish to delight our clients requires us to be lot extra agile and this was one thing that might not be achieved with a consumer heavy structure.
2. Sub-Optimum Shopper-Server Interactions : The consumer facet orchestration meant that we had been making a number of round-trips to our backends earlier than the UX may begin to paint itself. We knew that we may unlock lot quicker and slick experiences if we optimized for community chatter by stitching information on the backend.
3. Shoppers Administration Madness: With greater than 20+ distinctive apps and platforms to help, consumer facet structure meant that each characteristic needed to be constructed and launched these many occasions. Usually occasions this resulted in us over indexing over our largest buyer footprint (Android), whereas different platforms struggled to catch-up.
4. Inconsistent Cross Platform Parity: Even with this duplication, there was no surety that the options had been constructed with excessive constancy and similar specs. Heck, even inside a single platform there was little to no governance. As such two related purposeful options on the app could also be unintentionally developed as impartial and diverging modules.
5. Lacking Design System: Final however not the least, we wished to unleash a recent, partaking and cohesive design and UX. This meant that each part needed to converse the identical design philosophy and needed to be thought afresh.

The stage was set for a serious shake up within the total Hotstar structure and we began to deliberate on varied choices starting from piece-meal elevate and shift (incremental migration) to platform particular evolutions. However at Hotstar, we like to tackle large daring bets and thats precisely what we did!

We figured that whereas we could possibly management the quantity of unknowns with an incremental migration, we could by no means have the ability to repay all of the tech debt that had collected within the Rocky structure with this method. As an example, we wished to align on widespread specs for our consumer libraries that dealt with issues of storage, community, analytics, and so on. An incremental migration would have held us again from disrupting these layers for a lot of extra years. Likewise, on the server facet we could have needed to tackle lot extra operational complexity of managing two units of stacks.

We determined that we want a full rewrite of our stack and that meant re-looking at our total frontend and backend structure. And that’s the place the Hotstar X journey begins.

Within the subsequent set of articles, we’ll deep dive into the assorted technical and product decisions that we made and the way we pulled collectively a mammoth process of launching the brand new platform in 14 international locations inside a single day. Keep tuned!

We’re hiring throughout roles and features! Come work with us and partake within the audacity! Try https://careers.hotstar.com.