How Disney Hotstar (now JioHotstar) Scaled Its Infra for 60 Million Concurrent Users

Disney+ Hotstar scaled from 25 million to 61 million concurrent users during the 2023 Cricket World Cup through a comprehensive infrastructure overhaul. Key improvements included separating cacheable from non-cacheable APIs at the CDN layer, migrating from self-managed KOPS to Amazon EKS, implementing distributed NAT gateways per subnet, and introducing a Datacenter Abstraction model. This abstraction unified multiple Kubernetes clusters into logical data centers with a centralized Envoy-based API gateway, replacing 200+ individual load balancers. The team also eliminated NodePort limitations by switching to ClusterIP services, standardized service endpoints, and adopted single-manifest deployments. The final architecture distributed 200+ microservices across six optimized EKS clusters, each designed for specific workload types.