Setting the scene
From an early stage, the company chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the foundation for its platform. AWS enabled Masterchannel to experiment rapidly, evolve its processing pipeline, and scale in line with unpredictable creative workflows — from individual artists mastering a single track to professionals uploading entire albums simultaneously.
As Masterchannel transitioned from startup to scale-up, growing rapidly in both usage and processing volume, the company needed to ensure that rapid technical progress was matched with strong operational control and cost awareness.
To support this phase of growth, Masterchannel chose Cloudya, a Scandinavian AWS partner, to take ownership of AWS billing, cost optimization, and ongoing advisory.
In collaboration with Arrow, AWS's global distributor, Cloudya also facilitated structured Well-Architected Reviews, ensuring that architectural decisions remained aligned with best practices as the platform evolved — without slowing development velocity.
What follows is Masterchannel's own account of the technical challenges they faced, the architectural decisions they made, and the results achieved as their AI platform scaled rapidly on AWS.
The challenge
When we began building our audio enhancement platform on AWS in 2022, we were handling a modest volume of tracks and had not yet experienced the traction we have today. As a platform where artists and musicians upload their songs to receive an enhanced version in a couple of minutes, our success is directly tied to our ability to process audio reliably and at scale.
We reached this scale this year, as we grew from processing 100 songs per month in 2022 to well over 75,000 songs per month by 2025. While we have always built with AWS, this growth exposed a critical bottleneck in our architecture. Key parts of our song processing pipeline were not serverless. This legacy structure struggled to handle the increasing load, which resulted in several timeout issues and upload failures for our users. The problem was especially severe during bulk or album mastering sessions, where users would upload gigabytes of music simultaneously.
The solution
To solve this critical scaling issue, we re-designed our architecture, processing, back-end, and front-end into a fully serverless system. This move was essential for our continued growth. A serverless model allows us to scale autonomously, instantly provisioning resources to handle unpredictable workloads. We cannot control when creativity strikes or when an artist decides to upload an entire album. Our infrastructure must adapt to their workflow — not the other way around.
This new architecture ensures we can seamlessly manage both massive, sudden peaks in demand and quieter periods with equal efficiency, without manual intervention.
The results
After migrating our entire tech stack — front-end, back-end, and processing — to a fully serverless architecture, we have seen several satisfying and measurable results:
- Improved customer satisfaction and reliabilityThe timeout issues and upload failures have been effectively eliminated. Users now experience a highly reliable and consistent service, whether they are processing a single track or uploading gigabytes of data for an entire album. This reliability is fundamental to user trust, especially for artists who trust us with their art.
- Lower processing costsOur infrastructure costs are now directly tied to actual usage. We no longer pay for idle server capacity. Autonomous scaling has optimized our resource allocation, leading to significantly lower processing fees per song and a 40% reduction in processing costs.
- Simplified maintenance and operationsThe new serverless system is far easier for our team to maintain, deploy, and update. This reduces our operational overhead and allows our engineers to focus on developing new features for artists rather than managing and patching infrastructure.
Why Cloudya and Arrow
As Masterchannel's platform and AWS consumption continued to scale, it became essential to balance speed of innovation with financial predictability and architectural discipline.
Cloudya provides a single point of accountability for AWS billing, commercial optimization, and ongoing advisory, ensuring that growth in usage is matched with transparency and cost control. Through Well-Architected Reviews conducted together with Arrow, Masterchannel benefits from continuous architectural validation — helping identify risks and improvement areas early, rather than after they impact customers or costs.
This partner setup allows Masterchannel to move fast without accumulating unnecessary technical or financial debt, giving the team confidence that their AWS environment is scalable, efficient, and ready to support continued global growth.
— Masterchannel
