Case study - High-Performance Live Streaming Platform with Interactive Games
A massive live streaming platform conceived to connect streamers with their audience through real-time interactive games, supporting thousands of concurrent viewers with sub-200ms latency.
- Client
- Catabum
- Year
- Service
- Live Streaming Platform
Overview
Catabum is a live streaming platform that connects streamers with their audience through real-time interactive games, turning every broadcast into a participatory event where viewers directly influence what happens on screen.
Built between 2023 and 2024 over 18 months of intense work, the platform was designed from the ground up to support massive, concurrent loads: thousands of simultaneous viewers per stream, each interacting with game mechanics synchronized at minimal latency.
The technical challenge
Building a real-time entertainment system posed unique architectural challenges:
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Massive scale: Supporting thousands of concurrent streams, each with hundreds or thousands of viewers interacting simultaneously.
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Ultra-low latency: Synchronizing game events between the streamer and a massive audience with a sub-200ms latency target.
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Event throughput: Processing tens of thousands of events per second (votes, predictions, game actions) without degradation.
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Extreme concurrency: Multiple game mechanics running simultaneously with shared real-time state.
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Automatic elasticity: Scaling resources automatically in response to viral traffic spikes.
What we did
- Live Streaming Platform
- WebRTC · HLS
- Apache Kafka
- Redis Cluster
- Kubernetes · Terraform
- Game Engine (Go)
Knot Software Factory designed a world-class architecture that redefines interaction in live streaming. The combination of Kafka, Redis, and Kubernetes scales to thousands of concurrent users while keeping latency imperceptible.
Product and Technology
- Events/second processed
- 10K+
- End-to-end latency
- <200ms
- Infrastructure as code
- 100%
- Horizontal scaling
- ∞
High-Performance Architecture
Apache Kafka — The Nervous System of Events
Every platform event is published to Kafka: viewer votes, game activations by streamers, trivia results, donations. This architecture handles tens of thousands of events per second:
- Topics per stream: each broadcast has optimized, partitioned topics
- Massive fan-out: a single streamer event propagates simultaneously to thousands of consumers
- Replay persistence: events retained for auditing and historical playback
Redis — Real-Time State
Redis plays critical roles: pub-sub for WebSocket events, in-progress game state, real-time rankings, and distributed rate limiting:
- Event Pub-Sub: WebSocket servers distribute events to connected viewers via Redis
- Game state: score, time remaining, and participants stored for microsecond-level access
- Leaderboards: rankings built with Redis Sorted Sets, updated on every event
Kubernetes + Terraform — Immutable Infrastructure
- Terraform: a single source of truth, with all resources defined in versioned code
- Kubernetes: HPA (Horizontal Pod Autoscaler) on all critical microservices
- GitOps with ArgoCD: every change goes through a reviewed pull request before reaching production
- Observability: Prometheus + Grafana + Jaeger for metrics, traces, and logs
Complete Technology Stack
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| API Gateway | Node.js · TypeScript |
| Game Engine | Go — concurrent game-logic engine |
| WebSocket Server | Node.js · Redis Pub-Sub |
| Video | RTMP · WebRTC · HLS · CDN |
| Event Bus | Apache Kafka |
| State/Cache | Redis 7 Cluster |
| Frontend | React · TypeScript |
| Database | PostgreSQL · ClickHouse (analytics) |
| Infrastructure | Kubernetes · Terraform |
| Monitoring | Prometheus · Grafana · Jaeger |
Platform Modules
Streamer Panel
The broadcast control center: stream management, an interactive game library, activation and control of live games without cutting the broadcast, a real-time results panel, and monetization tools.
Viewer Experience
A low-latency HLS player, participation in interactive games (votes, predictions, trivia, spin wheels), real-time chat with moderation, a points and rewards system, and notifications for streamer events.
Interactive Game Engine
Catabum's core differentiator: multiple simultaneous mechanics with real-time synchronization. It supports votes, predictions, trivia, spin wheels, collaborative minigames, gamified chat commands, and scheduled events.
Security and Resilience
- Authentication: short-lived JWTs, rotating refresh tokens, MFA for streamers
- Rate limiting: distributed in Redis to prevent abuse
- Anti-cheat: detection of anomalous patterns (bots) with automatic bans
- Chaos Engineering: controlled component-failure tests in staging
- Encryption: TLS 1.3 across all communications, including WebSockets
Delivery and Current Status
The platform was delivered turnkey:
- ✅ Complete source code and technical documentation
- ✅ Kubernetes infrastructure deployed with Terraform
- ✅ Operational CI/CD pipeline with ArgoCD
- ✅ Initial catalog of game mechanics
- ✅ Configured monitoring dashboards and alerts
- ✅ Knowledge transfer to the Catabum team
Status: Platform delivered and in operation, with active streamers broadcasting and thousands of viewers participating in real-time interactive games.