FSB Technology Relies on GridGain to Power Their Scalable, High Performance, Real-Time Sports Betting Platform

Headquartered in London, FSB Technology (UK) Ltd. provides a real-time sports betting platform as a fully-managed service. The solution includes an automation layer to manage raw data feeds, proprietary live pricing models, bet placement, and liability management. Founded in 2007 by sports betting veterans, the company has become its industry’s technology leader, servicing operators and end-users on four continents. The FSB platform supports over 500 casinos and live dealer games, and transacts more than £2 million in bets daily while processing over 700 bets per second.

THE CHALLENGE: HUGE AMOUNTS OF DATA, REAL-TIME PERFORMANCE

To support live betting during sporting events, the betting platform must be real-time and highly performant. Huge amounts of event data must be constantly updated, and this data must be immediately available to a vast number of clients. For example, as a game progresses, new betting opportunities emerge. Odds must be calculated and presented to users in real-time, and bets and event results must be processed instantly.

FSB also tracks liability data. Each bet has a potential payout, and FSB constantly tracks the worst-case payout potential at any moment. FSB must also be able to scale as the number of bettors, sports, events for each sport, and betting opportunities before and during each event continue to grow dramatically.

Prior to GridGain^®, FSB accelerated processing using Memcached to cache data from the company’s single Postgres database. However, Memcached, a key-value cache, did not support complex queries, severely limiting performance and scalability.

The Solution: The GridGain In-Memory Computing Platform

Following testing, FSB opted to deploy the GridGain Enterprise Edition, a comprehensive in-memory computing platform from GridGain Systems. GridGain offered the innovation and affordability of an open source solution, but with the enterprise-level support and features FSB needed to run the solution in production.

“GridGain has enabled us to provide a high-performance, highly-responsive, and highly-available hosted platform for our partners,” said Sam Lawrence, CTO at FSB Technology (UK) Ltd. “GridGain is extremely flexible, works as advertised, and is vital to meeting our strict SLAs.”

Based on Apache^® Ignite^TM, GridGain in-memory computing solutions enable massive scale-out of data-intensive applications. They provide dramatic improvements in transaction times versus architectures using disk-based databases while easily integrating with existing databases. GridGain utilizes a massively parallel architecture on affordable, industry-standard hardware, which allows the amount of RAM to be easily scaled by adding more nodes to the cluster.