ZEE5 is a leading Indian over-the-top (OTT) video-streaming platform that delivers streamed content via Internet-connected devices. The platform offers a wide variety of content—movies, TV shows, web series, and original programming—across multiple genres and languages.
Owned by Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited, ZEE5 produces over 260 hours of content daily, with a monthly active user base of more than 119.5 million users across 190 countries.
ZEE5’s operations and customer satisfaction are dependent on its backend infrastructure being robust and scalable to handle immense traffic and complex workflows. In order to future-proof its infrastructure and to maintain its competitive edge, the company needed to streamline operations and enhance its database management capabilities. This included the migration of its entire OTT platform, including a total of 100+ microservices and 80+ databases to Google Cloud.
Pramod Prakash, Senior Vice President of Engineering at ZEE5, was on the stage of MongoDB.local Bangalore in 2024. He shared insights into how ZEE5 managed this migration without hindering performance or disrupting its services.
“It was a massive project which required a very carefully orchestrated migration plan,” said Prakash.
Massive migration, zero downtime: Challenge accepted
ZEE5’s team embarked on an ambitious journey to migrate a total of 40+ microservices (out of its 100+ microservices) to MongoDB Atlas. These were previously running on the Community Edition of MongoDB and on other NoSQL databases.
One of the challenges of this migration was to ensure continuous data flow for the platform’s 119.5 million streaming users. To do so, Prakash and his team created multiple environments using a change data capture tool. This ensured continuous replication of data so the user experience would not be impacted.
“We had to build four environments: dev, QA [Quality Assurance], UAT [User Acceptance Testing], and production,” explained Prakash. “We needed to keep testing and verifying each environment, and then finally enter the production phase when we migrated the data and moved the traffic.”
The approach involved migrating production data twice: first for testing and then for the final cutover. This was to minimize any data loss. ZEE5 used MongoDB Atlas’ integrated tools mongosync and mongomirror. The tools helped achieve an essential goal: avoiding any downtime.
“We migrated this entire mammoth application with zero downtime!” said Prakash. “We have not stopped ZEE5’s operations at all.”
“The second important thing is the performance: you want to be 100% sure that the entire scale and peak traffic will work seamlessly within the new cloud environment,” added Prakash.
ZEE5 relied on MongoDB Professional Services (PS)’s support. The PS team helped architect and plan the entire migration strategy. They also accompanied Prakash’s team step by step to ensure there would be no unexpected disruptions.
The production environment was built and tested rigorously before the final migration to ensure seamless performance at peak traffic levels.
“We iterated until we were 100% sure that the new environment was ready to take up ZEE5’s peak traffic. Functionally, it was all perfect,” said Prakash.
The power of the Atlas platform
According to Prakash, the power of MongoDB Atlas lies in the fact that it offers a fully managed platform. “There is no maintenance overhead at all,” he said. “All upgrades happen automatically without any downtime. We are also leveraging auto-scaling capabilities and point-in-time recovery.”
All of this enables efficient handling of varying traffic loads without manual intervention. Additionally, data recovery capabilities are enhanced, and most importantly, the engineering team can prioritise application development rather than operational maintenance.
As of February 2025, MongoDB Atlas supports a total of seven key use cases at ZEE5: payments, subscriptions, plans and coupons, video engineering, Zee Music (users’ preferences and playlists), content metadata, and the platform’s communication engine (SMS and email notifications).
Looking ahead, ZEE5 is working on more use cases powered by MongoDB. For example, the company is looking to completely migrate their master data source for content metadata to MongoDB Atlas. ZEE5 is also considering relying on MongoDB Atlas to support and enhance its search and recommendations capabilities.
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