About the customer
Sportradar is the leading global sports technology company creating immersive experiences for sports fans and bettors.
Established in 2001, the company is well-positioned at the intersection of the sports, media and betting industries, providing sports federations, news media, consumer platforms and sports betting operators with a range of solutions to help grow their business.
Sportradar employs more than 2,300 full-time employees across 19 countries around the world. It is their commitment to excellent service, quality and reliability that makes the company the trusted partner of more than 1,600 customers in over 120 countries and an official partner of the NBA, NHL, MLB, NASCAR, FIFA and UEFA. Sportradar covers more than 750,000 events annually across 83 sports.
With deep industry relationships, Sportradar is not just redefining the sports fan experience; it also safeguards the sports themselves through its Integrity Services division and advocacy for an integrity-driven environment for all involved.
The Challenge
Sportradar has worked tirelessly over several years to improve its quality and speed of execution by implementing DevOps best practices across all its product portfolio and core services. This included migrating multiple on-premises systems to Amazon Web Services opening up a number of opportunities when implementing such DevOps practices.
56Bit was approached by Sportradar to migrate a set of large internal applications, collectively dubbed Timesystem, to AWS. 56Bit worked in parallel with Sportradar’s engineering team to optimize the system code in a way that it could better use all the enhancement opportunities AWS can provide.
The systems to be migrated were hosted on 30 servers in an on-premises environment. The components targeted for migration consisted of:
- Timesystem: The main system used for managing employee data regarding vacation and other absence requests, and for some employees’ time tracking and shift management. This component was built with PHP and MySQL.
- Stamp IO: This component provides WebSocket functionalities for the stamp-in status in the Timesystem application and was built with Node.js.
- HR Budgeting Tool: This component helps manage future Sportradar budget requirements.
- Intranet: An internal web application providing information about the company and a search engine for employee details.
The Solution
The agreed-upon strategy was not a simple lift and shift migration but rather the opportunity was taken to re-platform Timesystem onto a docker containers-based solution running on fully managed serverless services by AWS.
This allowed Sportradar to achieve the following positive outcomes:
- From originally having a minimal CI/CD structure, this solution was designed from scratch to have full CI/CD capabilities, aligning the solution with DevOps best practices. This included the ability to approve, promote and deliver new versions of the infrastructure, the CI/CD pipelines, as well as the application(s) themselves, through a fully automated system.
- From originally having minimal backups and disaster recovery options, to having a strong, automated and fully compliant backup system, which together with the use of Infrastructure as Code, has given Sportradar the ability to quickly recover from disasters.
- From manual TLS certificate renewal to a fully automated certificate renewal system (through the use of AWS Certificate Manager).
- And finally, Sportradar internal end-users saw a noticeable increase in application(s) speed, owing to the numerous performance optimizations carried out, as well as, to the seamless autoscaling capabilities powered by AWS Fargate and ECS.
More detailed information about the implemented solution can be found below.
Why AWS?
AWS is Sportradar’s public cloud provider of choice. The maturity, scalability and unparalleled feature set provided by the AWS service portfolio, drove Sportradar to choose AWS for most of its workloads.
Why 56Bit?
56Bit provides peace of mind to technology-driven business through best-in-class cloud solutions. Sportradar, whose core business is totally dependent on the underlying technology required an experienced partner with profound knowledge on serverless technologies that could deliver high-quality service on time and within budget.
Sportradar teamed up with 56Bit to consult, design, build and migrate this platform, working hand-in-hand with several engineering and development teams.
Solution Details
Goal: The creation of a highly available, secure, scalable, and flexible solution that requires minimal management. All whilst ensuring DevOps best practices are implemented at all levels. The solution would host multiple Sportradar internal applications, used by its 2,300 strong workforce to track time, shifts, vacation leave, sick leave, budgeting and an informational intranet.
Solution: A cloud-native architecture was designed for this migration consisting of the following components:
- Single AWS region making use of 3 Availability Zones (AZs).
- Identical development, staging and production environments built with Hashicorp Terraform, fully deployed through an automated Gitlab pipeline.
- Route53 internal hosted zones for DNS routing and translation.
- Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets for logging and other static object storage all accessed through an AWS VPC endpoint.
- Elastic File System (EFS) with NFS support for fully managed distributed file storage.
- Private Application Load Balancer (ALB) to serve as a single point of entry for all REST and WebSocket requests.
- Elastic Container Service (ECS) for container orchestration.
- Multiple ECS Services with autoscaling capabilities.
- Multiple ECS tasks that auto-run at specific time intervals, triggered through the EventBridge service.
- AWS Fargate for serverless container hosting.
- Relational Database Service (RDS) clusters spanning multiple AZs whilst supporting auto-healing and auto-failover.
- ElastiCache for Redis enabling very fast access to in-memory cached data.
- Simple Email Service (SES) for internal email delivery.
- Certificate Manager to enable TLS based encryption for any connections to the system.
- A Gitlab based DevOps pipeline that enables each microservice to be built and deployed independently and in a fully automated fashion, whilst ensuring no system downtime. This pipeline also involved integrations with Sonarqube, WhiteSource and other automated testing solutions.
- Full connectivity with Sportradar’s global Transit Gateway-based network, including VPN. For more information on how we helped Sportradar build this highly automated global network kindly refer to this case study.
The migration was planned and executed over several months, going off without a hitch. Any migration-related downtime was kept to a minimum and well-planned in advance, whilst ensuring several fall-back scenarios were in place.
