Paramount+ is a treasure trove of streaming entertainment for audiences around the world. Viewers can use clicks, swipes or voice commands to watch iconic movies like “The Godfather'' and “Top Gun,'' classic TV shows like “Star Trek'' and “Survivor,'' and “Yellowstone.'' Get instant access to modern hits like “, “1883,'' and more. ” “Halo”. To provide streaming content that is available 24/7 to viewers around the world (as demand spikes during large-scale live events), Paramount+ delivers speed, agility, security, and global reach without downtime. They needed a robust technology stack that could deliver. To address these diverse technology challenges, Paramount Global selected Google Cloud as the platform on which to build the future of streaming.
Paramount+ brings the excitement of live sports directly to consumers, along with a vast library of recorded entertainment. Whether watching on a connected TV, web browser, or mobile device, viewers watched UEFA soccer, March Madness, NFL, college football, and a variety of other sports this past year. Other times I would switch between them. This included his 2024 Super Bowl LVIII, which was watched by 123.4 million people across all platforms and was the most-watched event in recent history, led by record viewers on Paramount+. Includes the most streamed Super Bowl of all time.
Zero downtime was not only a technical goal, but also a commitment to our business team to ensure our subscribers had a consistent and seamless experience. Serving subscribers around the world requires a robust architecture running on a scalable platform and a well-trained team.
The technology behind the curtain: Paramount+ and Google Cloud
Paramount+'s technology stack included many components specifically tailored to your media and entertainment needs. The team adopted a service-based architecture powered by Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for flexibility, stability, scalability, and rapid updates. This has allowed the team to improve the speed and performance of development and operations.
With subscriber growth and rapidly changing business needs, you can streamline your technical operations with a variety of Google Cloud services, including Google Cloud Compute Engine, Bigtable, Pub/Sub, Cloud Ops Suite, Network Intelligent Center, and Cloud Armor. I started considering services. The architecture team worked with Google Cloud Engineering to evaluate various products that could support the business's SLA and security needs.
Security and service availability are critical for customer-facing applications. To prevent DDoS attacks from disrupting the streaming experience for tens of millions of users, Paramount+ uses Google Cloud Armor managed protection, along with other industry-standard security tools. Additionally, to ensure zero downtime across the global platform, the Paramount+ technology team applied DevSecOps processes to the architecture, integrating security from the beginning of the development process.
To ensure smooth operations and rapid updates, we have adopted site reliability engineering (SRE) practices in conjunction with Google Cloud. This approach relies on automation, testing, proactive monitoring, and seamless teamwork. In addition to implementing SRE practices, the Paramount+ technology team is leveraging a multi-zone approach to increase resiliency. This ensures true geo-redundancy, an active/active configuration that spans multiple Google Cloud regions. Through this strong partnership, Paramount+ is able to ensure superior performance, especially during high-traffic events like the Super Bowl.
Paramount+ engineers worked closely with Google Cloud to establish principles to guide this complex transition.
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Multi-region commitment: The Paramount+ and Google Cloud teams have been working together for over a year to enable us to scale our infrastructure across multiple regions. This work was accomplished without any downtime or degradation of the end-user experience. The Paramount+ team can guarantee that adding new regions will be completed in days, not years. Before going multi-regional, Paramount+ had already adopted stateless principles to ensure optimal scale and usage of Google Cloud resources. This strategic shift has helped Paramount+ prepare to deliver a seamless experience while ensuring security and zero data loss.
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Scalable architecture: Paramount+ employs a distributed database that runs across multiple regions to ensure data consistency. Paramount+ and Google Cloud strive to keep their architectures resilient to handle spikes in traffic during live events or broadcasts of hit shows. This makes it easy to both prescale and autoscale your infrastructure. In addition to CI/CD principles, the Paramount+ team also employs a blue-green deployment approach to provide a consistent experience for end users and reduce risk.
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Local independence: It was important to bring the service closer to users while mitigating natural disasters that could disrupt the service. This active/active multi-region allows Paramount+ to support large numbers of daily active users and unprecedented amounts of traffic during large-scale sporting events. We have strict policies to ensure that no region is dependent on any other region. This happens from the content delivery network (CDN) all the way to the database. The Paramount+ team has ensured that adding or removing scale within a region will not impact the overall end-user experience.
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Operational Consistency: The Paramount+ SRE team has established standard guidelines and processes to simplify management and maintain regional homogeneity to address business needs in a timeline format. With consistent security, auditing, and deployment processes in place, end users don't need to know anything about regions.
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Strict goals: The team had goals to meet aggressive recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). In order to support 71 million subscribers and provide a true 24/7 streaming service, entering into and enforcing strict service level agreements was a key aspect. Stringent SLAs ensured zero downtime, low latency, and a robust monitoring and observability framework that allowed the team to proactively address issues that could impact end users.
Moving to a multi-region setup means rethinking the entire deployment process, automation tools, and underlying database while maintaining established RTOs and RPOs. By working with Google Cloud, Paramount+ was able to move from a multi-zone architecture to an active/active multi-region architecture and build a world-class streaming service.
the future is bright
The media landscape is dynamic, and Paramount+ has adapted its technology platform to suit audiences around the world. Achieving broadcast quality across platforms and devices is not easy. The team is working hard to achieve this, working closely with the Google Cloud team.
With this foundation, Paramount+ aims to continue to entertain viewers without interruption and deliver a world-class customer experience, while continuing to optimize and innovate with new technologies such as generative AI.