Volta teamed up with Cloud Combinator to execute one of their most demanding live activations in their roadmap. We ensured Volta's infrastructure was tuned to match the moment.
With one week until kick-off, we collaborated with Volta's engineering team to take a capable platform and optimise it to meet specific demands on game day. A US-region deployment, the concurrency profile of a Super Bowl audience, and a security posture suited for a global event.
We were introduced to Volta on Thursday 29th January, with the Super Bowl taking place on Sunday 8th February. The team came in with a clear set of optimisation goals, and a tight window to deliver against them. We blocked out an all day workshop at the Cloud Combinator office on Saturday 31st January, followed by 72 hours of focused collaboration, before the team landed on the West Coast.
Here is how a single Saturday workshop and a focused 72-hour collaboration delivered a production ready platform which performed flawlessly on the night.
Volta empowers brands, creators and businesses to build immersive digital experiences that audience’s control directly from their smartphones. Their work spans live events, retail spaces and interactive advertising. Whether it is a stadium of fans co-creating a moment in real time or shoppers interacting with a flagship store installation, Volta gives audiences a way to participate rather than just spectate. For Super Bowl LX, that meant tens of thousands of fans interacting live, simultaneously, from their phones.
The challenge had three focus areas, each of which needed to be in place ahead of game day.
The first focus was enabling a US-region deployment. With the activation taking place in San Francisco and the majority of users physically on US soil, deploying close to the audience was essential to deliver the sub-second responsiveness Volta’s experience is built around. Serving traffic from a non-US region would have added meaningful latency to every interaction, and at Super Bowl scale that latency is the difference between a real time moment and a noticeably slower one.
The second focus area was tuning for Super Bowl-scale concurrency. Volta’s platform is built for live audience interaction, and the projection for game day was tens of thousands of fans hitting the experience simultaneously, expecting sub-second responsiveness. The optimisation work centred on how compute scaled and how data was read and written at peak, making sure the architecture was sized for the specific traffic profile of a Super Bowl moment rather than typical activation.
The final focus was layering in event-grade security. High-profile live events routinely attract bot traffic and DDoS attempts. The workshop covered adding production-grade protection in front of the platform alongside a broader review of account and organisation set up, including root account configuration, IAM permissions and AWS organisations guardrails. The goal was to bring the security posture up to a standard appropriate for a globally visible event.
By the end of the workshop and the collaboration that followed, every focus area had been addressed, and the activation ran successfully on Super Bowl Sunday. The platform comfortably handled 15,000 concurrent executions, with users interacting live throughout the event, and held steady through the peak moments where traffic is as it’s most demanding.
The US-region deployment was in place, latency was where a real-time interactive experience needed it to be, and the security posture was at a standard well-suited to a globally visible event.
Volta’s lead engineer left the workshop with a tuned stack and a clear understanding of the design decisions behind it, which paid off through every peak moment of the event.
“Event timelines are often out of your control. CC stepped in when we needed them, their diligence and competence made a force-multiplier of the time I had left”
Following the event, Volta came back to Cloud Combinator for a second day-long workshop to build on the foundation laid in the first session. This covered broader security hardening, longer-term architectural decisions, and AWS root and organisation management.
We covered DynamoDB Global Secondary Indexes, partition key design, and the trade-offs between ElastiCashe and DynamoDB for Volta’s specific access patterns. The result is an infrastructure that is no longer just Super-Bowl ready but optimised to support whatever Volta takes on next. Including big live events, more concurrent activations and continued growth across their roadmap.
See here for more details on Volta’s Super Bowl LX Event: https://made-with.voltainteractive.com/super-bowl-lx