Migu Video Ltd. (Migu Video), a leading new media company in China, was formerly China Mobile’s mobile video arm, but became independent in 2015. The company focuses on the development of audio and video content innovation, leveraging its unique advantages in the three fields: broadcasting, Internet and mobile.

In 2022, based on the demands of its customers for outstanding content, Migu Video has created audio-visual experiences on a massive scale, including 5G and the metaverse experiences for the Beijing Winter Olympics and the metaverse in the Qatar World Cup. These projects had billions of playbacks and interactions from millions of people all over the world. With its remarkable performance in broadcasting major international sports events such as the Beijing Winter Olympics, the Tokyo Summer Olympics, the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, and the UEFA European Football Championship, Migu Video has become the leading platform for sports content in China in recent years.

The increasing popularity of the platform led to the exponential growth in user numbers and a need to innovate and bring new features to market. Migu Video has created an ecosystem for a massive number of users to enjoy an immersive digital experience, which involves “Mixed reality (M)”, “Immersive social media (I)", "Interactive gamification engine (G)", and "Ubiquitous computing power (U)". The booming business growth is positively correlated to the operational efficiency of its databases and the distributed database technology has played a crucial role.

During major sports events, the number of users on the Migu platform surge dramatically in a short period of time, which exerts a huge pressure on its infrastructure. With the increase of the user viewing frequency and interactive features, the platform had three core challenges: capacity bottleneck, performance support and workload management. If the traffic overwhelmed the database then the viewing experience would be negatively impacted.

Taking one example, the video operation system is one of the most complex backend application systems at Migu. Its service powers content production, marketing, auditing, royalties, KPI statistics and much more, so it is vital to the smooth running of the company. However, as the data volume significantly increased and the processing speed slowed down. The data volume in the program library alone exceeds 90 million records, including videos, programming data and much more. Performance got so bad, and the system was no longer able to support many of the core applications. In addition, there are various types of aggregation queries running in the background, which involve complex conditions, joining multiple collections and calculating statistics by groups.

Originally Migu's core systems and websites were built on traditional relational databases. However, Migu had found they were no longer the best fit for the wide variety and massive scale required by the growing company. A database revolution from relational to non-relational and from centralized to distributed is now taking place.

In 2018, Migu Video gradually reduced the use of its traditional databases and started trialing the industry’s leading document database: MongoDB. The team quickly said that it was a perfect fit to address the challenges of flexible, diverse and changeable Internet video services, as well as large-scale complex structure of its technical systems. MongoDB helps Migu effectively handle large volumes of unstructured data and a decentralized deployment, empowering Migu to optimize its applications and further improve the business's performance and scale.

Following the path of migrating existing data, then adding new data, Migu Video has successfully migrated its traditional databases to MongoDB. In terms of the scale of deployment, the decline of traditional databases corresponds to the growth of MongoDB. In the past six years, the deployment of MongoDB in Migu’s core system has increased by more than 75%, accounting for more than half of all databases. Currently, there are more than 450 instances as Migu Video has gradually restructured its core systems.

The team at Migu deploy MongoDB Enterprise Advanced, a collection of products and services that help them drive security, efficiency, and take full control of their MongoDB databases. They also use Ops Manager that automates much of the operational overhead of managing the database such as deploying, monitoring and backing up.

After Migu Video completed the migration to MongoDB, the performance of the core system has increased by at least 35 times. The time spent on data association and routine activities was reduced and the database was changed from a centralized to distributed model, enhancing reliability. Overall, MongoDB has helped Migu Video achieve improvements in four key areas:

• Flexible data models enable new features

  “Bullet screen” is an important feature offered by China’s video streaming platforms, which allows users to superimpose their comments over the video that’s playing. In addition to supplementing video content, bullet screen also lets viewers interact and express their thoughts when watching videos. Thanks to MongoDB's flexible schema, developers can easily add attribute fields online for the program to parse into a variety of bullet comments without interrupting viewing or changing the database model.

• Scaling across geographies to improve performance and reliability

  In order to improve customer experience and support nationwide operations, Migu Video is continuously enhancing the public cloud expansion and edge computing capabilities of its technical system. Using the Zone Sharding feature of MongoDB, the company can segment its user data by area code. Each sub-center stores the data of its own zone by shard, whereas the main center has the data of all shards and each zone has a highly available replica set, hence building an efficient and resilient architecture with computing and storage close to users.

• Massive volume

  In early winter of 2022, Migu Video successfully passed the test of peak workloads during the Beijing Winter Olympics. MongoDB has helped Migu’s various systems achieve up to 200,000 QPS (Queries Per Second) and 100,000 TPS (Transactions Per Second). The system ran smoothly with zero failures.

• Efficient automated operations and management

  Under its strategy for middle office operations and management (O&M), Migu Video is drawing on the best practice of Ops Manager and integrating that into its general middle office O&M system, which has become one of its core capabilities for O&M. Migu Video is leveraging the mature visualization capability of MongoDB Ops Manager to improve the telemetry capability of its DevOps team, and enable the R&D and O&M teams to get immediate feedback and consistent views, allowing them to collaborate efficiently and continuously learn together.

With the increase of services at Migu Video, MongoDB Enterprise Advanced has become one of the core pieces of the company's infrastructure, penetrating into various detailed aspects of its business and operation. In the future, while helping Migu Video employees improve their productivity and handle the impact of huge traffic with ease, MongoDB will continue empowering the company to provide users with more immersive and diverse experiences.

Zhao Jiangtao, Director of System Construction and Operations at Migu Video