Make Secure Online Meeting Platform

Challenge

With the development of online meetings and remote working, many well-known online conferencing software came into being. Zoom meetings, launched in 2013, quickly became a key player in digital communication, amassing 200 million meeting minutes in its first year.

At the peak of Zoom's usage during the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform reached nearly 500,000 paid business customers while its daily active users reached around 350 million.

Zoom faced the following technical challenges due to its rapid business expansion.

Managing over 100 backend microservices efficiently
Dealing with a large number of hybrid cloud environments due to global business services
Integrating complex middleware and infrastructure into the continuous delivery pipeline

These challenges are not simply additive but rather a multiplicative relationship, resulting in a highly complex situation.

Solution

To address its technical challenges, Zoom implemented a continuous delivery pipeline using APISIX Ingress Controller. This solution involved migrating configurations of hundreds of API gateways to APISIX, ensuring data security and service stability.

Competitive Edge of Our Solution

Taking its business scenarios into consideration, Zoom attached more emphasis to the two parts, which can be satisfied by APISIX Ingress Controller.

Data Security

Zoom prioritizes customer privacy and service security and widely uses mTLS authentication and verification in online meeting rooms and phone calls. However, many API gateways only offer this service in their enterprise version. APISIX Ingress provides great feasibility and convenience to achieve this goal, making it an attractive solution for Zoom.

Service Stability

Zoom's backend services require Multi-AZ (Multi-Availability Zones) deployments across different regions for high availability. This often involves putting businesses in other data centers. In the event of an error in the original data center, client traffic needs to be transferred to another one. APISIX Ingress can successfully meet this requirement, making it an ideal solution for Zoom.

Results

Project Management

Zoom uses a GitOps workflow to build API Gateway configuration into the application delivery model.

Application Development

The integration of APISIX's configuration with the continuous delivery pipeline workflow provides developers with a more labor-saving way to focus on APIs' routing and authentication capabilities and implementing business functions.

Environment Management

Some configurations of APISIX ingress were implemented to reduce environmental differences, enabling system managers to comprehensively control these differences.

Infrastructure Management

Each plugin of the pipeline provides configuration items for infrastructure engineers, allowing for a unified security and risk control strategy across all services.

Make Secure Online Meeting Platform

> 100 backend services

Unify middleware worldwide