CASE STUDY: BLEACHER REPORTSHOOTS & SCORES:
12 MILLION
DELIVERING MASSIVE SPORTS SCORES & NEWS
Bleacher Report (B/R) is one of the leading sports news sources in the country. Second
only to ESPN, Bleacher Report is a growing force for team-specific sports content, commentary, and real-time event coverage. B/R’s goal is to deliver a comprehensive experience for sports fans and foster engagement with favorite teams and topics across all
major sports. The content that B/R delivers includes curated content originating fromfeatured columnists and external sources, all pushed to fans in real-time. They provide
timely and relevant news to sports fans keeping them informed and ahead of the game.
To make this experience possible, Bleacher Report delivers real-time sports scores,
news, and team updates via the Team Stream mobile app. With over 12 million downloads of the Team Stream app, users get a personalized fan experience wherever theyare. Sports fans get all the latest news and alerts, all in one place on their mobile devices. In order for B/R to deliver a high volume of alerts at peak events, they needed a solution that would easily scale, and remain available in the event of a major traffic spike.

ABOUT
BLEACHERREPORT

WHAT IS THE
TEAM STREAM
APP?

BLEACHERREPORT
STATS

Bleacher Report, a divisionof Turner Sports, is the leading digital destination forteam-specific sports content and real-time event
coverage, and is one of
the fastest-growing digitalproperties in the U.S.

Bleacher Report’s Team
Stream™ mobile app is a
top-rated, industry-leading tablet and smartphoneapp. It provides mobile
users with Bleacher Reportdaily sport- and team-specific email newsletters.

• Over 12 million downloads• Peak of 3000 concurrent
workers on dedicatedcloud-platform• Each worker can distribute
thousands of push notifi
cations to Team Stream
app users on demand

BEHIND THE SCENES AT BLEACHER REPORTThe Bleacher Report ops team has long held 99.9% uptime as a primary goal. In order toachieve this goal, changes to the infrastructure had to be made. At an early stage in theirre-factoring process, the ops team realized they were not only exceeding the limits of an
infrastructure of 60 concurrent servers, they were also consumed by the complexity and la-www.iron.ioCopyright © 2015, Iron.io, Inc.

“Notifications are criticalto Bleacher Report. With
over 12 million downloads, users look to Team
Stream for breaking news
alerts about their favorite teams and players.
Speed of delivery is aconstant focus for us. No
longer worrying about infrastructure allows us tofocus on delivering newfeatures and optimizing
existing ones.”
Eddie Dombrowski,
Senior Software Engineer,
Bleacher ReportCASE STUDY: BLEACHER REPORT
bor-intensive monitoring they needed to do for their infrastructure. B/R had reached a pointin their rapid growth where they needed to implement an asynchronous task processing
system – one that was cloud-based, reliable, and could scale with the volume of notifications
they were sending at any given time.

DEPLOYING IRONWORKER FOR
FLEXIBILITY AND SCALE“Because our system was already worker based, it was easy to deploy IronWorker. We had afunctioning prototype copy of our existing system in less than a day. A week later, we wereable to migrate our code base to use the Iron.io platform. And, a week after that, we shut
down our deprecated infrastructure and never looked back,” recalls Dombrowski. B/R’s initialtest was to send some notifications to users of their mobile app via scheduled IronWorker
events. “Our push notification system is now on-demand and highly concurrent,” said Dombrowski. “Before re-factoring our existing app code (which took less than a week) and moving to Iron.io, we managed our own cluster of worker instances. When high throughput wasneeded we often found ourselves waiting for new instances to spin up.”

BEFORE IRON.IO

Bleacher Report had relied on a variety of self-hosted DIY open-source components tostream the latest information about fans’ favorite sports teams and events. During major
events, such as the NFL Draft, World Series, and NBA Finals, the pace of delivering up-to-theminute notifications would often completely overwhelm the system and create huge backlogs in their workload processing. B/R learned the hard way that delivering massive volumesof notifications at scale could negatively impact response times and overall uptime of thesystem. This kind of spike in messaging traffic combined with the potential for reduced performance and reliability was simply unacceptable.

“We noticed a dramaticperformance
improvement when we migrated
to Iron.io. We enjoyed all
the benefits of removing awhole stack of infrastructure, allowing our teams
to focus on features while
also saving money,” says
Dombrowski

NET RESULTS

After B/R completed their migration to the Iron.io platform, they quickly realized strong
measurable benefits in both alert times and cost savings. The combination of a reliable,scalable cloud infrastructure plus the power of asynchronous task-processing services from IronWorker, enabled B/R to deliver high volume messages at scale, offload critical tasks, free up valuable resources to maintain a more flexible environment, and savetime and money. Since starting with IronWork, B/R has grown to a peak of 3000 concurrent workers on dedicated cloud-server resources. Non-peak usage has B/R simply spooling up 500 IronWorkers to send an update or alert to their millions of users – as eachworker can distribute thousands of push notifications to mobile app users on demand.
“We noticed a dramatic performance improvement when we migrated to Iron.io.
We enjoyed all the benefits of removing a whole stack of infrastructure, allowing our teams tofocus on features while also saving money,” says Dombrowski. “One not so obvious, yet huge
win for us is our ability to scale painlessly. Before Iron.io, we were constantly triaging production issues. After Iron.io (a year later that same month), we delivered billions of push notifications with ease.” The Iron.io mission is to reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure
and administration of developer tools, while delivering a turn-key solution for highly scalable
event-driven applications.

www.iron.io
Copyright © 2015, Iron.io, Inc.

“Before Iron.io, we wereconstantly triaging production issues. After Iron.
io, we delivered billionsof push notifications withease.” says Dombrowski