Shared experience solution turns to AWS to cope with demand

Hopin is a shared experience solution that provides all-in-one event management technology for virtual, hybrid and onsite events. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, there was an increased demand for virtual events all over the world, which proved to be a huge opportunity for Hopin. Within the space of just two years, the company went from being a team of eight to employing over 1,000 people remotely and serving approximately 100,000 customers.

To cope with this rapid growth and increased scale of events, Hopin turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to improve reliability and expand into new geographic regions. AWS also allowed the firm to decrease database and cache latency by around 20 per cent and improve the playback experience of its live events. One of the core features of AWS that Hopin now uses is Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS), a managed live streaming solution.

Evelina Vrabie, engineering manager at Hopin said: “We don’t need physical offices to make the world feel closer. Using well-established, secure, and scalable solutions like those on AWS makes this mission possible. Event organizers can deliver a broadcast to a larger audience because we can support stages with up to 100,000 viewers at the same time without issues.”

Amazon IVS allows event organisers to engage with participants using features such as live video stages, networking tools and polls. It also gives them more control over storage, troubleshooting, and video stream management. Hopin has also gained new customers from new countries because Amazon IVS supports geographically dispersed broadcasters and viewers.

“By using Amazon IVS, Hopin was able to expand into new regions because of this better playback experience, and it unlocked notable revenue-driving deals”, Vrabie commented.

Another AWS features that Hopin now uses is Amazon Aurora, a MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud. Aurora, which automatically grows storage up to 128 TB per database instance, means that Hopin can host large and concurrent events without database capacity limitations.