[AUDIO LOGO]
ROMIN IRANI: Hello, everyone.
Welcome to a new episode of "Architecting
with Google Cloud."
I'm Roman Irani.
I work as a developer advocate at Google Cloud.
Podcasts have seen significant growth
as a medium of entertainment and keeping up to date
in topics of your interests, but what
are the elements of designing and running a leading podcast
platform with 1.5 million users, and more importantly, tuned
to their preferences in terms of topics and local language
content?
I'd like to welcome Rushabh Vasa who
heads the technology platform behind India's leading podcast
platform.
Welcome to the show, Rushabh, can you
tell us a little bit more about your background and your role
at Agrahyah Technologies?
RUSHABH VASA: Thank you.
Hi, I'm Rushabh Vasa, co-founder and CTO
of Agrahyah and Aawaz.com.
Aawaz is India's leading podcast platform in Indian languages.
We are available in five languages
and distributed through 14 endpoints.
We generate more than 9 million streams every month
with more than 1.5 million users using our services
through different endpoints.
ROMIN IRANI: Thanks for sharing your details, Rushabh.
How did you first think about this idea
and what led you to create this?
RUSHABH VASA: Sure.
So as podcasting was growing in India,
we identified the need for Indigenous audio streaming
platform for Indian listeners and creators.
That's when the idea of podcast was born.
We wanted to build a cutting-edge technology-backed
streaming platform for Indian users.
We started working on it in 2018 and launched
Aawaz.com in January 2019.
ROMIN IRANI: Interesting.
And given that there's so much diversity
in the number of users, their language preferences,
and platform choices, could you tell us
a bit more about the process that you went through
to solve this problem?
RUSHABH VASA: So when we started building the platform,
we realized Indian users are different.
So our focus was always on providing a seamless and better
streaming experience whenever and wherever they
are streaming from.
Hence we focused on building a robust platform
and distribution.
Truly, our users can listen to our podcast.
We have 14 different endpoints like website, Android app, iOS,
KaiOS, Indus OS, Jio Set-top Box, Fire TV, Amazon Alexa,
Ola Play, and so on.
We also recently launched our app
on Visteon's In-Car Infotainment System
so people can listen to their favorite podcast while driving.
ROMIN IRANI: That's quite a wide variety of platforms
on which you are available.
And particularly, right, what I find interesting
is you mentioned that Indian users are different.
Could you share a few points around that?
RUSHABH VASA: Sure.
So Indian users and content consumption habits
are different.
For example, most of our listeners come from tier two
and tier three cities of India.
And since internet connectivity was an issue,
we had to make sure the listeners have
seamless streaming experience while listening
to their favorite podcasts even in low bandwidth.
Also we found a few interesting things, like a lot of users
have preference to download the podcast and listen offline.
When we tried to figure out the reason,
we came to know that users are conscious and conservative when
it comes to using data.
Since podcasts are new in India, discovery
is also a big challenge.
That's where we use the data and build a basic recommendation
mechanism where users get a personalized notification based
on their historic listening patterns
and also make it culturally relevant,
like sending notifications for Hanuman Chalisa on Saturday
morning.
ROMIN IRANI: Fantastic.
You've talked about building a robust and better streaming
experience for your users, plus there's
support for multiple languages.
It's going to be very interesting for us to learn now
how you built this on Google Cloud.
So could you guide us through a dive into a user's journey,
or specifically, what happens when
a user wants to listen to a particular podcast
and they click Play?
RUSHABH VASA: Yes.
As I said, our distribution is our strength.
It requires a seamless experience
for our listeners to stream their favorite podcasts
on all platforms.
That's where our robust architecture on Google Cloud
platform helps us achieve this performance at scale.
So just to explain you about the architecture,
whenever a user clicks on a play button or sends a request.
Let's say they've opened a website Aawaz.com.
That goes to Cloud DNS where we resolve that domain name
and then through a Cloud Run, we load a front-end website
for the user.
And then whenever a user clicks or selects
any particular episode that he wants
to listen to on a podcast, that again
requests come through a load balancer
because there are millions of streams coming every day.
So through load balancer it goes,
the request goes back to the Compute Engine
and that's where the backend APIs are managed through that.
Our Cloud Storage gives them the right episode file, the image,
and thumbnails.
Then again, that information sent back to the user.
That's where the user gets to listen to his podcast.
Let's say if the request comes from the backend API,
then again the Cloud handles the partner's API
that we have built and those APIs are then again processed
to our Compute Engine and then the same process is followed
and users get to listen to the podcast.
With the help of this architecture
it was possible to scale from 10,000 streams on Day 1
to more than 90 million streams monthly.
ROMIN IRANI: Interesting.
Thank you for taking us through that user journey
and what happens from an architecture point of view.
Now, looking at the scale, and I'm
sure this is just the start in terms
of the popularity of your services,
so I'm sure that the journey that you've reached till now
had its fair share of ups and downs.
Could you highlight any challenges
that you faced as you went through your journey
from a technology point of view?
RUSHABH VASA: Yes.
There have been many challenges, as you said rightly,
but one major challenge became when we started growing.
We reached from 2 million monthly streams to 6 million
streams in just four months and that traffic was coming
from multiple end points.
So it was difficult for us to manage that kind of traffic
because we were not prepared for it.
And that's where we used load balancers and other techniques
to solve this problem.
ROMIN IRANI: Great.
Now, you specifically mentioned certain Google Cloud Services
which have helped you in your journey.
So any examples you would like to dive further
into and highlight that have helped
you to achieve the scale?
RUSHABH VASA: Yes, like I said, we have used many services,
but I would specifically like to talk about the Google's
BigQuery and Data Studio because that
has been a great help for us.
Because as we started growing, our content strategy
is solely dependent on our analytics.
We analyze and study what type of podcasts
users are listening to.
We capture a lot of detail analytics
of the users like what they are doing on our apps,
like what kind of genres users are listening to,
the completion rates of their favorite podcasts,
the comments that they are putting up there,
the demographic and content popularity,
language-wise podcast streamed.
And that helps us create a user persona and many other things.
This data helps us take informed decision
on our content strategy, which led us
to users spending more time and listening
to the podcast on average.
Also we shared the Data Studio dashboard
with our clients and sponsors to look
at the real-time data on how their podcasts are performing
on Aawaz.com.
ROMIN IRANI: It's great to see how you've
captured user preferences, giving them
personalized recommendations.
Could you maybe share or dive into the architecture
behind this solution too?
RUSHABH VASA: Yes.
So whenever a user performs any action on our website
or on mobile app, that action is captured in terms of events
and we have built our analytics logic
which helps us capture that event
and process it on our system.
So whenever that data is captured on local device,
we pass that data from the local device to the Cloud
using a CSV.
That CSV is then transferred to Cloud Storage where we extract
the data from the CSV and store it in the Cloud Storage
for a backup.
From there it goes to the BigQuery and BigQuery,
we again then process that data and query the required results
that we want.
And then that results are stored on a dashboard
that we have built for our clients using the Data Studio.
Also we have used a personalized dashboard
which helps us get more deeper insights
about the user listening patterns and the user data.
ROMIN IRANI: Thank you, Rushabh for sharing what
happens behind the scenes here.
Now, what can we expect to see from Agrahyah
in the future given its popularity and ideas that you
may have for future features for your platform?
RUSHABH VASA: As a platform, we always want
to innovate and provide better streaming experience
to our listeners.
We recently launched a podcast in Dolby Atmos
where it gives user an immersive audio experience.
We also introduced Aawaz Live where
listeners can interact with the host
in a live audio environment.
With the help of data, we are building
programmatic audio advertising solution
which will help clients reach out
to the right audience on Aawaz.
ROMIN IRANI: Well, we can't wait to try out
some of those features that are coming out.
Rushabh, thank you so much for joining us on our show.
Where can viewers go and learn more
about Agrahyah Technologies?
RUSHABH VASA: Thank you, Romin, and thanks to the entire team
at Google for inviting me for this show.
It was really great to interact with you.
To know more about us, you can visit our website
Aawaz.com or Agrahyah.com.
Or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
ROMIN IRANI: With that, we come to the end of this episode
where we saw how Agrahyah Technologies used content,
personalized recommendations, and local language support
to build out India's leading podcast platform, Aawaz.com
on Google Cloud.
If you liked the content, please share
and subscribe to our channel where we continue to bring you
awesome tech stories.
Till the next episode, thanks for watching.
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