Cloud: How Betclic prepares PSG-Real Madrid


It’s a dark day at Betclic. At the DSI of the online betting platform (300 people), days and weeks have colors – green, orange and black – depending on the match. The more numerous and important the matches, the darker the week, and the more computer resources must be added to allow the millions of simultaneous connections to function.

Tonight, Betclic will mainly practice scale-up, understand the ability to stack computing resources in the cloud, on the AWS side, to meet the very high demand from players. “It’s a big problem because we have little traffic during the day,” explains Yoann Cosniam. “Clearly the traffic is related to the game. When you have a PSG match, the bulk of the traffic takes place during the pre-match. »

This is where bettors rush to the gate to place bets on their favorite teams, or try to guess the number of goals that will be scored. The law specifies that 7 seconds must have passed between the moment the player places his bet from his smartphone, and the moment the bet is registered.

“As soon as there is a goal, there is a huge load peak on the platform”

“At the start of the match whistle, nothing is happening on the platform, everyone is watching the match,” says Yoann Cosniam. “But as soon as there is a goal, there is a huge load peak on the platform. » Very complex volatility to manage in terms of IT resources.

“At half-time, there is a peak load, people check their bets. And at the end of the match, all the users who came to the platform to place a bet come to see if they won. So there too we have huge load peaks. »

Hence the need for Betclic to place computing power and storage resources at the right time to support the platform during these peak times. But it cannot be configured finely every time, depending on the matches. “On a Saturday, we can have 300 live matches, so it can be too complicated to scale,” says Yoann Cosniam.

Architecture diagram of Betclic’s hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Still, for a PSG-Real Madrid on a Tuesday evening, the upscale / downscale configuration in the cloud can make sense, provided you plan well in advance. “We work on patterns. We know that before the match we will do upscale, we know that during the match we will do downscale. Of course, what we don’t know how to predict are the load peaks following the goals,” says the architect.

To do this, cloud engineers set up steps and probes that configure scale-up and scale-down. And the actual configuration is done in serverless. “When I arrived four years ago, we decided that we didn’t want to manage servers on AWS, to avoid maintenance and patch management. But we continue to make containers on-premise,” explains Yoann Cosniam. “Everything on AWS is automated. We define time slots on which we scale, with the possibility of going from 30 to 90 containers, and if with 90 we don’t have enough, we let AWS manage. Sometimes it goes up to 110 or 120.

Still, for the time being all network traffic still passes through Betclic’s datacenters. “It allows you to manage network peering, it’s a business choice,” says the architect. “Mastering the network allows us to maintain control over security. As a result, we only manage cybersecurity on the datacenter side, it’s easier for us. »

Automate provisioning

Eventually, Betclic’s IT department wants to use traffic metrics to automate provisioning. Something to go further than planning. “We receive the information a few seconds before the hearing and therefore we would like to use it to predict the scaling”, indicates Yoann Cosniam.

Betclic is a comeback in the world of online betting. The company is more than 15 years old, but completely missed the mobile turn, before pulling itself together when its founder returned to the helm. Perhaps that’s why the shift to the cloud is being watched so much by the business. No question this time of being overtaken by a new technical revolution.

The flexibility offered by the cloud must make it possible to deconstruct the entire current information system to switch it to the cloud in a very important way. “For the moment we are on Nutanix hyperconverged on our datacenters, with redundant direct connect links to AWS”, indicates the architect. “It’s going to take several years to migrate to the cloud, and I don’t think our interest is in migrating everything. But starting this year, we are going to put a new cloud-native betting platform into production. All bets will be taken on the cloud. »





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