Case Studies | SaaS B2B

Scaling for Super Bowl LX: How Cloud Combinator Partnered with Volta to Optimise Game Day

Volta
About

Volta empowers brands, creators and businesses to build immersive digital experiences that audiences control directly from their smartphones. Their work spans live events, retail spaces and interactive advertising — whether it is a stadium of fans co-creating a moment in real time or shoppers interacting with a flagship store installation. For Super Bowl LX, that meant tens of thousands of fans interacting live, simultaneously, from their phones.

Challenge

The challenge broke into three focus areas, each of which needed to be in place ahead of game day.

Focus area 1: US-region deployment

With the activation in San Francisco and the majority of users on US soil, deploying close to the audience was essential for the sub-second responsiveness Volta's experience is built around. Serving traffic from a non-US region would have added meaningful latency to every interaction — and at Super Bowl scale, that latency is the difference between a real-time moment and a noticeably slower one.

Focus area 2: Super Bowl-scale concurrency

Volta's platform is built for live audience interaction, and the projection for game day was tens of thousands of fans hitting the experience simultaneously. The optimisation work centred on how compute scaled and how data was read and written at peak — sizing the architecture for a Super Bowl traffic profile rather than a typical activation.

Focus area 3: Event-grade security

High-profile live events routinely attract bot traffic and DDoS attempts. The workshop covered production-grade protection in front of the platform alongside a broader review of account and organisation setup — root account configuration, IAM permissions and AWS Organisations guardrails — to bring the posture up to a standard appropriate for a globally visible event.

Solution

Volta's platform performed flawlessly on Super Bowl Sunday — comfortably handling peak concurrency, with the US-region deployment in place and latency where a real-time interactive experience needed it to be.

15,000+

Concurrent executions handled

< 1s

Peak response time

7 days

From workshop to event-ready

By the numbers:

  • Handled 15,000+ concurrent executions with users interacting live throughout the event
  • Zero downtime deployment held steady through the peak moments when traffic is at its most demanding
  • Real-time optimisation during the event with sub-second responsiveness for fan interactions
  • Security posture at a standard well-suited to a globally visible live event
Changes

We focused the work on the parts that had to hold under live event traffic.

  • Latency — US-region deployment was in place before kick-off so every fan interaction stayed within the sub-second window Volta's experience depends on.
  • Scale — Compute, data reads and writes were tuned for Super Bowl concurrency — not typical activation traffic — so the platform stayed responsive at peak.
  • Security — Production-grade edge protection, IAM hardening and AWS Organisations guardrails were layered in ahead of a globally visible event.
  • Architecture — A follow-up workshop covered DynamoDB GSI design, partition keys and ElastiCache vs DynamoDB trade-offs — leaving an infrastructure optimised for whatever Volta takes on next.
  • Handover — Volta's lead engineer left with a tuned stack and a clear understanding of the design decisions behind it — paying off through every peak moment of the event.

We were introduced to Volta on Thursday 29 January, with the Super Bowl on Sunday 8 February. A single Saturday workshop at the Cloud Combinator office, followed by 72 hours of focused collaboration before the team landed on the West Coast, delivered a production-ready platform in time for game day.

AWS Stack

The event-ready platform was built on services designed for scale, low latency and global delivery.

AWS Lambda

Serverless compute that scales automatically with demand during live event spikes.

Amazon DynamoDB

Low-latency, high-throughput data storage tuned for peak read/write concurrency.

Amazon CloudFront

Global content delivery and edge performance for US-region fan interactions.

Volta

Event timelines are often out of your control. CC stepped in when we needed them — their diligence and competence made a force-multiplier of the time I had left.

Toby

Founder

See Volta's Super Bowl LX build →
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