The Opportunity

As gyms reach a historic high of 66 million memberships, attendance is declining because 72% of gym-goers work out at least one day a week at home. Reflecting the work-from-home trend, gyms are having to adapt to meet consumers where they are. The customer at the center of this case study was looking for a way to evaluate the user experience for its subscribers during fitness classes.

The company’s focus was on having fully interactive sessions with an instructor, including optional end-user video and audio sharing capabilities, i.e. the ability to share their camera and/or microphone feed. While the customer’s application was already hosted on AWS Cloud, we needed to streamline the current approach to application performance testing.

Key Challenges

The main challenges this customer was looking to address were as follows:

  • Enable user experience testing with camera and/or microphone sharing during class (under load).
  • Leveraging Puppeteer (a framework for headless Chrome testing, allowing users to control the browser using commands written in JavaScript) to execute scripts – two users per Amazon EC2 instance.
  • High costs associated with maintaining the infrastructure and dependency on manual scale down.
  • Manual errors from its previous vendor costing the client USD 10k+ in AWS.

The Solution

In order to address the challenges above, SourceFuse carried out a detailed assessment to streamline the existing approach of individual users from EC2 instances using puppeteer scripts, after which it proposed the following:

  • Migrate the Puppeteer code from EC2 instances to AWS Lambda to reduce the infrastructure dependency.
  • Eliminate the need for manually scaling up and scaledown required for the solution.
  • Leverage third party SDK (Agora) to enable audio and/or video sharing during classes. This would reduce the infra requirements for running the Puppeteer script on AWS Lambda.
  • Implement Amazon SQS (message queuing service) to ensure 100% availability.
  • Deploy Amazon S3 backup of logs.
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The Results

As a result of modifying the approach by which users are simulated and streamlining the performance testing solution, SourceFuse helped the customer to achieve:

  • Reduce chances of manual error as no scale up and scale down is needed.
  • Reduction in cost by 66% per run ($35 to $12).
  • Reduction in setup time from 10 – 15 minutes to instant.
  • Easy, centralized storage of logs in S3 for verifying the stream quality as well as user experience.

About The Customer

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in the US, this customer provides the ultimate fitness streaming platform. Offering both white-label solutions for businesses and direct-to-consumer access to live and on-demand classes from top global studios and trainers. Today, it serves over 550k members in 39 countries specializing in wearable technology, boutique fitness studios, and workout videos.

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