Near real-time data for subscription bundling: How Bango built a scalable, cloud-native platform

Data availability and accessibility are paramount for businesses aiming to drive intelligent decision-making and unlock new monetization strategies. At the heart of the Bango Digital Vending Machine® (DVM) – a SaaS product powering subscription bundling at scale – data needs to be fast, flexible, and future-proof.

At today’s AWS Summit London (April 30), Manuel Alfaro Solis, Director, Advanced R&D shared insights into how how the Digital Vending Machine® from Bango has been architected to achieve near real-time data availability. His talk focused on event sourcing, real-time streaming, and a scalable data architecture that underpins high-performance subscription bundling for global partners.

Understanding the Digital Vending Machine® from Bango

The Bango Digital Vending Machine® is a purpose-built platform enabling subscription bundling at scale. It connects mobile operators, banks, retailers, and content providers – including global brands like Amazon, Microsoft and Google – allowing them to deliver seamless subscription experiences to end users.

This technology enables partners to offer services like Netflix, Xbox Game Pass, or Snapchat+ through third-party bundles, simplifying everything from onboarding to billing. The data platform that powers the Digital Vending Machine® from Bango plays a pivotal role in delivering those experiences reliably and in real-time.

Data strategy for global bundling

To meet the speed and scale required by subscription bundling, the Digital Vending Machine® from Bango was built around an event-first data strategy. This approach ensures that actionable data is available within minutes of a transaction -whether that’s a new subscriber activating an offer or a top-up hitting a billing threshold.

Rather than fragmenting data across systems, the Digital Vending Machine® from Bango consolidates insights into a unified data layer. This enables faster self-serve reporting for internal teams and customers, supports bundle migrations from acquired platforms, and powers metrics that guide future bundling strategy.

Managing massive scale

The Digital Vending Machine® from Bango processes millions of daily events, including those tied to subscription activations, billing entitlements, top-ups, and upgrades. These are captured using event sourcing, which stores every action in its raw state to ensure accuracy, auditability, and replayability.

With the ability to process hundreds of terabytes of data and sustain throughput of 14,000 transactions per second, this infrastructure ensures subscription bundles launch and run smoothly – whether it’s in a single market or across multiple global partners.

One of the standout achievements highlighted by Manuel is the near real-time data capture, which takes under two milliseconds for 95% of event batches. This low latency is crucial for maintaining high throughput, especially when processing billions of records within a short timeframe.

Engineering for performance: Key design considerations

The following design principles ensure the Bango Digital Vending Machine® delivers consistently at scale:

• Asynchronous event sourcing: By utilizing event sourcing, Bango can manage data asynchronously, allowing for reliable and predictable data flow. This design choice eliminates the risks associated with traditional CRUD operations, ensuring that every transaction is captured accurately.
• Predictable scalability: The DVM architecture is designed to be linearly scalable, maintaining low latency and jitter. This predictability allows the company to control operational costs effectively.
• Transactional ledger: Every event is persisted and captured to the nanosecond, enabling thorough troubleshooting and reconciliation. This level of detail is essential for maintaining data integrity and consistency.
• Data quality assurance: Every event is schema-validated before it enters the system, avoiding the inconsistency issues common in traditional big data pipelines.

Technology stack powering the DVM

The data architecture for the Digital Vending Machine® from Bango is organized into four core stages: Capture, Normalization, Refinement, and Consumption.

• Capture: Utilizing Kubernetes, Amazon MSK, and brokers, Bango captures data in real-time. ElastiCache is employed to cache data so it can build a back-pressure mechanism, ensuring low latency and high throughput.
• Normalization: Spark Streaming handles fast micro-batch processing, preparing event data for enrichment and validation.
• Refinement: This stage transforms raw data into tailored insights for use by sales, finance, data science, and engineering teams, with relevance to bundling outcomes.
• Consumption: Under normal loads, stakeholders receive processed data within 10 minutes – ideal for powering performance dashboards, smart top-up notifications, and real-time offer analytics.

Challenges and solutions

Building the Digital Vending Machine® from Bango required overcoming several technical challenges:

1. Streaming optimization: Delivering continuous, low-latency event processing while minimizing backpressure during partner campaigns.
2. Vendor integration: Harmonizing AWS and Databricks systems to support consistent schema cataloging and materialized views for data monitoring.
3. Job management: Reliable monitoring of data jobs is crucial for identifying failures and ensuring data integrity. Bango has implemented robust monitoring systems to manage this effectively.
4. Data migration: Bringing billions of records from acquired systems into the DVM platform, without interrupting live traffic – a feat made possible by elastic auto-scaling and batch recovery systems.

Conclusion: Powering global subscription bundling with data

Our innovative approach to data management exemplifies how companies can leverage technology to achieve near real-time data availability. By focusing on event sourcing, scalable architecture, and robust data quality assurance, Bango has positioned itself as the leader in the digital subscription bundling space. As we continue to refine processes and address challenges, we remain committed to empowering stakeholders with the insights they need to drive business success.

For organizations looking to enhance their data strategies, our subscription bundling journey offers valuable lessons in leveraging technology to create a reliable, efficient, and scalable data platform.

The Digital Vending Machine® from Bango demonstrates what’s possible when you combine advanced event sourcing with a laser focus on product experience. Data is no longer just an output, it’s an operational core. From enabling instant onboarding to delivering dynamic recommendations and unified billing, data powers every interaction inside the DVM.

For subscription providers, resellers, and partners looking to launch and manage bundles at scale, the Digital Vending Machine® from Bango provides the foundation to do it faster, smarter, and with full confidence.