Rooter

Packed stadiums, adoring crowds, millions of dollars of prize money: Esports can be just as thrilling and competitive as tennis, Formula 1 (F1), or cricket. Leading gamers are international superstars under just as much pressure as many world-class athletes and must prepare for the top events in similar fashion, putting in thousands of hours of training before a major tournament.

India is home to some of the biggest stars on the esports circuit and is one of the fastest-growing markets, with more than 500 million players. This makes it the second-largest gaming community in the world, and home to some of the biggest streaming platforms where players and fans share video clips, join communities, and demonstrate their prowess playing titles that include Battlegrounds Mobile India, Counter-Strike, and Call of Duty.

Entrepreneurs are finding ways to attract and monetize this huge audience, but few have been as successful as Piyush Kumar, Co-Founder and CEO of Rooter. In a very short time, Rooter has become the country’s biggest gaming and esports platform, with more than 40 million members and fast-growing revenues based on online advertising and subscriptions for premium content.

Rooter’s success is even more impressive knowing that it took less than 24 months to reach 40 million members and become the number one game-streaming platform in India. Kumar says that much of Rooter’s success depends on the end-user experience. “Our members are very competitive and protective of their achievements,” he says. “The two most important criteria are that it should be as easy as possible to access or upload content, and that this content is completely secure. You can’t afford a breach that threatens their data.”

When it came to addressing its platform priorities — scalability, performance, and security — Akamai was the first name that came to mind. “Akamai’s content delivery network technology, including Adaptive Media Delivery, enables Rooter to deliver consistent, high-quality online video securely to our growing online audiences while scaling fast and supporting rapid audience growth,” says Kumar.

To deliver rich, dynamic content for end users, Rooter uses Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator, which reduces network latencies and accelerates its API calls. For security, it has deployed Akamai’s web application firewall, which shields APIs and protects its systems from external attacks. “All of our streaming services and traffic flows through Akamai. It is the backbone of our business,” says Kumar.

Kumar also praises Akamai for understanding that the importance of the end-user experience is equal to that of the technology. “By choosing the best set of tools in the market, we succeeded in giving esports professionals, gamers, and fans a thrilling experience that looks fantastic. Member onboarding is also simple — just two or three steps so you don’t have to wait to get involved in the action,” he says.

When it comes to the impact of Akamai solutions on Rooter’s infrastructure, Kumar is delighted that Rooter has achieved 99.9% availability even during the highest traffic levels, including 900,000 users per day on its Android app.

Rooter has also eliminated the threat of security breaches. Akamai’s web application firewall has detected and prevented several potential threats while also providing protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that are no longer a risk to the business.

Most recently, Rooter has added Akamai Cloud Wrapper, which enables it to minimize the calls to its origin servers and better manage the costs associated with this process. “For most artifacts, only a single call is to the origin servers, and most of the traffic is served from the Cloud Wrapper cache. This reduces data transfer costs, as well as reducing the strain on our wider infrastructure.”

Kumar also highlights the importance of Akamai Plus Service & Support package, which includes expert assistance in the deployment and integration of Akamai solutions, and ongoing support and maintenance. “It means that we get regular health checks, recommendations, and flexible access to professional services whenever we need it,” says Kumar. “It’s been especially helpful as we configure and optimize our WAF rules.”

All this contributes to an uninterrupted experience for millions of online gamers. “Our success is based on making the gaming community look cool on an international stage while entertaining millions of people all over the world. Akamai is helping us grow fast while achieving these goals every day,” says Kumar.

Akamai powers and protects life online. Leading companies worldwide choose Akamai to build, deliver, and secure their digital experiences — helping billions of people live, work, and play every day. With the world’s most distributed compute platform — from cloud to edge — we make it easy for customers to develop and run applications, while we keep experiences closer to users and threats farther away. Learn more about Akamai’s security, compute, and delivery solutions at akamai.com and akamai.com/blog, or follow Akamai Technologies on Twitter and LinkedIn.