The hidden pub/sub of spotify

Abstract

Spotify is a peer-assisted music streaming service that has gained worldwide popularity. Apart from providing instant access to over 20 million music tracks, Spotify also enhances its users' music experience by providing various features for social interaction. These are realized by a system using the widely-adopted pub/sub paradigm. In this paper we provide an interesting case study of a hybrid pub/sub system designed for real-time as well as offline notifications for Spotify users. We firstly describe a multitude of use cases where pub/sub is applied. Secondly, we study the design of its pub/sub system used for matching, disseminating and persisting billions of publications every day. Finally, we study pub/sub traffic collected from the production system, derive characterizations of the pub/sub workload, and show some interesting findings and trends.