“CloudMile’s account management team is on top of things, responsive and can deal with quite a few ill-defined situations for us.“

CloudMile fully supports SWAG to develop into a technology-first streaming platform

Demand for premium video services is growing throughout Asia, with research showing that the online video market in Southeast Asia alone is estimated to reach $4.5 billion by the end of 2025. This growth is what’s driving the success of SWAG, one of Asia’s largest interactive streaming platforms. 

A technology-first approach to streaming entertainment 

Started as an incubator project in 2016 with Taiwan's 17LIVE, SWAG has been dedicated to redefining what streaming entertainment can be by taking a technology-first approach. 

SWAG offers several unique features and enhancements to their creators and users. For creators, they lower the barrier to entry by moving resource intensive tasks such as video blurring from creators' devices to the server. In addition, SWAG greatly values the privacy and security of their creator's content. For example, SWAG has integrated the same video DRM encryption that modern movie studios use to protect original video content. 

“Most brands use a third-party provider for live streaming, but we implement our own livestream infrastructure. For our users, we re-encode and optimize our video streams for the best playback performance. ” says Allan Lei, the CTO of SWAG. 

With its unique streaming offerings, SWAG has become highly popular throughout Asia, expanding its services into markets such as China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. The growth is creating a need for more innovative content services, which is what prompted SWAG to seek the support of CloudMile and Google Cloud. 

A smooth migration to GCP with CloudMile 

Before turning to Google Cloud, SWAG had begun operations with another cloud provider, but soon found it not cost effective without sacrificing other resources. The team used Kubernetes frequently and was thus looking for a provider with better container management and a user-friendly platform. This led Lei to evaluate Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which he quickly considered the better fit. 

SWAG enlisted CloudMile to migrate nearly its entire workloads to GCP within one month, marking the beginning of an ongoing partnership.  

GKE enables 70% resource utilization, keeps cloud operation costs below 1%

SWAG has been using GKE for several unique purposes. Among these is video encoding, which is based on the platform’s original video encoding pipeline rather than on Kubernetes, the open-source platform designed for deployment. The largest benefit for SWAG to implementing its computing resources on GKE is cost-effectiveness. 

“With Google’s GKE and our engineering experience in Kubernetes, we are able to maintain an average of 70% resource utilization for a variety of workloads such as APIs, video processing, and real-time data processing while keeping cloud operating costs below 1%,” says Lei. 

Lei also mentions how Google offers CDN in just one load balancer rather than as two separate services, making it very easy to manage.  

CloudMile as a reliable partner to scale with SWAG 

Since first teaming up to assist the website’s migration to GCP, CloudMile has worked seamlessly with the SWAG team as it scales and adopts new services. 

“We started with CloudMile in 2016 for cost management and cloud support,” says Lei. “Then CloudMile started to expand its business into AI and acquire new partners like Cloudflare. CloudMile’s account management team is very on top of things and responsive and can deal with quite a few ill-defined situations for us. As CloudMile grows its product offerings, it provides more opportunities for collaboration.”

SWAG leverages the power of Google Cloud and CloudMile to continually redefine the limits of streaming entertainment with its technology-first approach. The SWAG team’s positive experience with GKE and Cloud CDN is leading them to explore other Google Cloud solutions that can help it provide its global users with a more innovative streaming service and a better online experience.