Engineering for efficiency: how Bango reimagined real-time data at scale

Designed by Bango. Built on AWS. Powering the next decade of subscription growth.

The cloud promised scale. The cost came later.

The cloud changed how digital businesses grow. It removed limits, delivering instant capacity and elastic compute. No upfront investment, no waiting for infrastructure. Scale became available to small and large businesses alike.

But freedom isn’t free. Every transaction, renewal and customer event uses cloud capacity. Each analytics query adds cost. For many subscription businesses, cloud costs quickly rose faster than revenue. The convenience that once enabled innovation became a constraint.

That tension sits at the heart of the modern subscription economy. Platforms want real-time visibility, instant personalization and frictionless experiences, yet all those capabilities demand processing power. The more insight you want, the more you pay to get it.

The Digital Vending Machine® (DVM™) from Bango was built to change that equation. It is engineered and optimized to serve billions of subscriptions efficiently, by reshaping how data flows through the cloud so performance can scale without the cost curve following.

The architecture advantage: data that never stops moving

The DVM takes a different approach to data. Most systems fall into one of two models. Analytical (OLAP) platforms deliver insight but are heavy and slow. Transactional (OLTP) systems move fast but lack depth. Subscription businesses need both: the speed to act in real time and the intelligence to understand what’s happening.

The DVM closes that gap. It runs on an event-sourced architecture that treats every action as motion. Instead of overwriting data, it records each event: every signup, payment or plan change, as a new entry in the log.

Nothing is lost. Every state is recoverable. Compute load stays low, performance stays high and the full history remains auditable. This transforms the DVM into a hybrid engine: the immediacy of OLTP with the analytical strength of OLAP.

“On an event-driven design you never override anything. It all happens in the change log, making everything replayable, reversible and real-time at far lower cost.”

Manuel Alfaro, Head of Advanced R&D, Bango

The impact is significant. The DVM processes up to ten times more data per hardware unit than traditional systems. Data becomes easier to replay, roll back and reanalyze, delivering greater resilience and transparency with less operational overhead.

For subscription providers, that means every renewal, upgrade and bundle transaction happens faster, more reliably, and with greater visibility. The data keeps moving, and so does the business.

Real efficiency. Real impact.

The advantages are measurable, but they are also very practical.

Lower latency means subscription providers see what’s happening. Signups, upgrades and renewals show up quickly, not at the end of a batch process. That gives teams the confidence to adjust offers, pricing or placement while campaigns are live, instead of acting on yesterday’s picture.

Event sourced data streaming builds a clean journal of everything that happened. Every event is recorded, nothing is overwritten. That creates auditability by default. Allowing the DVM to trace outcomes back to individual events, which strengthens trust, simplifies reconciliation and reduces disputes.

The technology stack behind the Bango DVM is built for subscriptions, not general-purpose workloads. That brings sharper insight from the same data. Partners see which bundles are really driving retention, which acquisition channels are converting to paid, which payment methods are failing and why. Better questions get better answers, and those answers arrive fast enough to act on.

Precision in practice: built in Rust, optimized for scale

Efficiency starts in the architecture but shows up in how it is built. In the Bango DVM, the key event engine that streams subscription data is written in Rust, a fast memory safe language designed for cloud scale. Most of the surrounding services are written in Go, well suited to building lightweight cloud services. Rust is reserved for the highest volume path, where subscription events are taken in, put in order and written into the journal, so the most demanding work runs on the most efficient code.

Rust combines the efficiency of C with modern safeguards that prevent memory leaks and vulnerabilities. That gives this layer the precision to handle continuous flows of subscription activity, from video and music streaming sessions to game passes, news, sport and other digital services, without delay or data loss. The Bango DVM operates with minimal latency and high concurrency, ideal for services where every second of streaming and every successful start matters.

Running on Amazon Web Services, the most widely adopted cloud platform in the world, extends that precision globally. AWS provides the reach, reliability and elasticity to deliver the Bango DVM event sourced intelligence at scale, serving streaming providers, telcos, media, banking and lifestyle subscriptions through one API.

The DVM is designed to use AWS capacity with intent. Instead of throwing compute at demand, it consumes only what is needed, when it is needed. For operators this means a platform that is not just cloud based but cloud efficient, turning infrastructure that already exists into more performance, more stability and more value.

Compared to traditional architectures, the Bango DVM delivers:

• Trust and insight across subscriptions data
• 10x throughput on the same compute footprint
• Instant recovery and replayability that protects data integrity
• Seamless use within AWS environments, with no heavy replatforming
• Consistent real time analytics without ETL delays

In practice, that means new offers launch faster, partner reporting becomes easier and end users enjoy smoother, more reliable access to the services they love. Every event becomes part of a live data stream that supports decisions instead of draining budgets.

The new growth equation: efficiency equals advantage

For content providers and resellers, the real win is not in how events are stored or how many queries the platform can handle. The real win is in the headroom that creates. When the underlying engine runs efficiently, teams can spend more time shaping services, partnerships and campaigns, and less time wrestling with the plumbing.

For content providers, that means more focus on programming, brand and audience. Commercial teams can explore new types of bundles and promotions, confident that entitlements and usage will be handled consistently across channels. Expansion into new markets becomes a question of which partners to work with, not which systems to rebuild.

For resellers, efficiency makes a broader catalogue realistic. Adding new services, testing new bundles and tailoring offers to different customer segments becomes easier when integration effort and ongoing operational noise are lower. Reliable data from a single platform also makes it simpler to hold meaningful conversations with providers about performance and future plans.

The Digital Vending Machine from Bango sits quietly behind all of this. A single event sourced platform that connects subscription services with the channels that distribute them, so growth decisions are driven by opportunity, not by technical constraint.