Wynk Music App by Airtel Raises the User Experience Bar with Amazon EKS

About Wynk Music

Wynk Music is an audio streaming service under the Airtel Digital brand in India. Launched in 2015, its app and website have 72 million monthly active users. The company continues to roll out new features to customize user experience.

 Launched in late 2015 as an innovation unit of Bharti Airtel Limited, one of India’s key telecommunications companies, Wynk Limited runs Wynk Music—a leading music streaming service in India with 72 million monthly active users and more than 14 million tracks in its content catalog.

Wynk’s mission is to be the preferred destination for entertainment in India. Its business goal is to strengthen the monetization of its music app, particularly via paid subscriptions. Wynk’s strategy is to offer personalized premium experiences that help retain existing customers, attract prospective ones, and grow its paid subscriber base.

To grow its music subscription revenue, Wynk sought to offer a high-quality search and discovery experience where users have easy access to their desired content with a single click. Wynk sought assistance from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to launch its new Content Discovery platform, where users are given real-time tailored music recommendations.

To create an agile and horizontally scalable infrastructure to support the new Discovery platform, Wynk moved its monolithic applications to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to easily start, run, and scale Kubernetes applications in the AWS Cloud.

By running AWS EKS, the Wynk DevOps team has around 100 microservices live in production at any time, while reducing development time for new customer services from 2 weeks to 4 days. With a microservice-driven approach using AWS EKS, Wynk’s DevOps teams can run, scale and test tasks independently and in parallel resulting in faster services creation. Utkarsh Sopan, head of engineering, content discovery and personalization at Wynk, states that Wynk enjoys far greater agility than before.

Sopan says, “Our teams can now focus on building impactful customer-related services, because each developer now exercises end-to-end ownership of each microservice. They’ve benefited from using Amazon EKS to easily maintain Kubernetes clusters. We could also fit our existing workloads into half their former capacity and automatically accommodate changing traffic volumes at 99 percentile latency or under 50 milliseconds with the Amazon EKS Cluster Autoscaler.”

Using Amazon EMR to automate and operate its big data environment, Wynk collects seven billion events and processes four terabytes of data on user interactions daily. Hitesh Bhatia, head of DevOps at Wynk, explains how this data is processed using Wynk’s proprietary algorithm.

“Amazon EMR helps us use AI and machine learning models to clean up our data and intelligently power our user personalization efforts with the most effective recommendations. We can exercise greater control over this massive data environment with the flexibility of automated capacity provisioning and cluster tuning. AWS has also been actively involved in this entire journey, providing plenty of support with training, review, and immersion sessions to help us optimize our architecture,”.

Benefits of AWS

• Grew monthly active user pool from 50 million to 72 million over 2 years
• Improved user interaction with a 39 percent increase in clickthrough rate to Wynk’s homepage
• Ability to capture and use up to 60 different user persona attributes to create micro-user segments
• 100 microservices in production at any time
• Reduced development time from two weeks to four days
• Collect and process seven billion events a day—amounting to four terabytes of data
• Automatically accommodate changing traffic volumes at 99 percentile latency or under 50 milliseconds