Fleet Efficiency Lessons from Scaling Live Events Sustainably

When it comes to testing your fleet efficiency, you can't ask for a better stress test than a large live event like the Super Bowl. Successfully delivering a rapidly growing event year after year—without upgrading hardware and compromising performance—proves that you have done the right things to optimize your fleet. It also means your content delivery is more sustainable: every server you don't need to deploy represents less energy consumed.

At Fastly, we’ve been handling live events of this size for years and are happy to share what we’ve learned about optimizing our fleet for big live events with better performance and a smaller carbon footprint.

2022 vs 2023: What the Numbers Tell Us

Fleet efficiency is one of Fastly's critical cross-functional engineering efforts. Its goal? Increase the number of requests and amount of traffic we can deliver per server without expanding their  environmental impact.

To share what we learned about optimizing fleet efficiency and improving sustainability, let’s hone in on Super Bowl 2023 versus 2022. Why these two years specifically? Because we kept our fleet more or less the same and - even with the higher popularity of the event - managed to improve performance without increasing environmental impact.

The 2023 Super Bowl drew 123.7 million viewers to watch Kansas City’s win over Philadelphia Eagles. This is a 7.47% year-over-year increase in viewership. A growing number of Super Bowl viewers are relying solely on OTT, which means they are viewing directly online rather than using a cable network provider. Super Bowl's OTT viewership grew by 3 percentage points in 2023 compared to 2022. This brought extra pressure for content delivery in 2023. There was very little room for errors, and the consequences of missing those critical frames were extremely high, with worldwide impact. 

Looking at 2023 Super Bowl traffic, we delivered about 46% more traffic compared to 2022 during the peak viewing time with roughly the same number of servers in the fleet. The key to achieving these results was our fleet's ability to have capacity ready for major spikes in traffic without massive capex investments. And every efficiency gain helped us minimize our environmental impact.

Our Fleet Efficiency Gains in 2023 

Fastly improved performance materially year over year in 2023. If you look at our average throughput for Q1 of 2023, it was 29% higher year over year with the same fleet as in 2022. This was possible thanks to our software-defined infrastructure that allows us to make improvements on top of the infrastructure already deployed, finding efficiency and performance gains in run time while avoiding the environmental cost of deploying new hardware.

How to Plan For Large Live Events

To deliver large live events like the Super Bowl, you need to start planning early (several months before the event), especially if your team has not delivered many big events before. The planning needs to ensure that your fleet is optimized to handle the event and you have the right resources in place if anything unexpected happens. 

At Fastly, we have a large event playbook that we follow, which involves coordinating internally about how the teams are going to respond. We have a launch sequence like in space rocket launches. We have playbooks for every possible known issue from the start of planning to the end of the event. The playbooks include checkpoints for what needs to happen T minus one day, T minus two hours…, and then when the event starts. Internally, all of the teams will report their readiness.

You need to know at any point in time what the desired outcome is, and if things are not going the way you want, you have well-thoughtout contingency plans that the team has practiced. This will help you engage and solve issues.

Putting End User Experience at the Heart of Every Live Event

End user experience should be at the core of decision making when planning for live events. To get more out of the servers without impacting the performance of the live feed you should focus on targeted optimizations that directly correlate with the end user experience. Here are three metrics we recommend prioritising:

• Rebuffering Ratio – This measures how much time end users spend staring at a blank screen while waiting for playback to resume. 

• Video Playback Failure – This tracks how many video streams were disrupted during playback or failed to start entirely. 

• Time to First Contentful Paint (TTFCP) – This metric evaluates how long it takes for users to see the first frame of video content. A faster load time means less time staring at a black screen and more time enjoying the content. 

Better Fleet Efficiency = Better for the Planet 

Many customers are expecting more from their providers in terms of sustainability. At Fastly, we're actively thinking about how to set the goals in a way that we don't regress. So we make sure we do more with the same fleet, instead of deploying additional hardware. In the 2023 Super Bowl example, we kept roughly the same number of servers, but produced 46% more traffic. Every server we don't need to deploy represents:

• Reduced energy consumption

• Decreased cooling requirements

• Fewer embodied emissions from hardware manufacturing and transportation

• Less electronic waste at end-of-life

There are many different options in front of us every time we look at switching to a next-generation server. It is a significant consideration to make sure we don't adopt hardware that is negatively impacting our environmental goals. A certain technology might appear more appealing in terms of raw performance, but when you start modeling the power consumption, then all of a sudden it becomes a lot less attractive. 

While a significant portion of Fastly’s Points of Presence are covered with renewable energy, our higher-than-usual fleet efficiency also helps us be more sustainable. Every watt and server saved is a win for the planet, and at Super Bowl scale, those wins add up. 

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Planning a big live event? Let’s talk about how Fastly can help you deliver a stream your viewers won’t miss a moment of.