Mnet Plus real-time global voting system architecture improvement case | Amazon Web Services

Mnet Plus reached 45 million global cumulative subscribers within three years and has a peak MAU of 20 million; it offers live streaming and VOD.

Voting is a core feature directly tied to program outcomes (e.g., mAMA AWARDS voting and survival program debut selection) and must support many global users participating in short time windows.

The original architecture processed validation, history writing, and real‑time aggregation in a single pipeline: PostgreSQL held vote metadata; DynamoDB stored write‑only vote history as a point of no return; DynamoDB Streams triggered downstream processing; ElastiCache for Redis provided real‑time aggregation and duplicate‑prevention caching.

S3 and Athena formed a batch analytics path that periodically exported vote history for full re‑aggregation. The prior external partner solution was a commercial product, but the system was redesigned and internalized on AWS managed services.

The redesigned architecture separates three aggregation flows—real‑time (Redis prioritized for minimal latency), ledger (aggregation based on DynamoDB ledger data), and backup (separated to enable recovery without data loss). Ledger results may temporarily disagree with real‑time results and are later corrected; ledger data is stored in DynamoDB.