Genius Sports provides its customers with live sports and betting data across 240,000 events worldwide – each generating 10,000+ realtime messages.
Its value proposition is built on reliable, live data and on-premises infrastructure, but rapid growth brought challenges when it came to maintaining live data performance at low latency and global scale.
Genius Sports had been forced to locate ever larger, on-premises RabbitMQ clusters physically close to customers to deliver the reliable, predictable realtime performance at low latency that in-play betting demands. If data arrives late, players can bet on events that have already happened, costing Genius Sports’ customers money and damaging its reputation.
As a result, hardware capital and support costs were increasing exponentially, while infrastructure teams were constantly firefighting hardware issues.
Wondering how they overcame this challenge?
Genius Sports chose to migrate to Ably to benefit from our elastically scalable realtime infrastructure for the edge. Using Ably enabled Genius Sports to essentially hand off the heavy-lifting associated with live data processing and delivery, and gave developers the insight and flexibility they needed to innovate the core service and to offer customers more granular control of the data they subscribe to.
We spoke to Gary Williams, IT Infrastructure Team Lead at Genius Sports in our webinar - and you can now watch it on demand!
The key takeaways were:
Shifting to the cloud was key: Genius Sports chose Ably to provide realtime messaging infrastructure as a service in an early implementation of an ongoing shift to a cloud-first strategy – safe in the knowledge that the migration from RabbitMQ would require no significant refactoring of its wider architecture, coding or developer work.
The migration was straightforward: According to Gary Williams, "Overall, even with a super-cautious approach we had Ably live on our production system in less than two months. For a system handling business critical data, that is quite an achievement."
The move has freed up time and budget: The migration to Ably has eliminated annual hardware costs and freed up around 30 hours per month in RabbitMQ maintenance that Genius Sports’ developers and engineers can now refocus on service optimisation and innovation.
Sign up and see how you could benefit from moving to Ably.
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