Building Sports Betting Systems with Akka - Trevor Burton-McCreadie, Lunatech
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 2022-11-09

Building Sports Betting Systems with Akka - Trevor Burton-McCreadie, Lunatech

The world of sports betting is a David and Goliath battle between the price setters and the price takers, with both sides looking to make a profit. Setting the prices are the Bookmakers - organisations with hundreds, sometimes thousands of employees. They must constantly tune those prices to balance profit against risk whilst shouldering a constantly-evolving regulatory burden. On the other side there’s a wide spectrum of people taking those prices: at one end there are those who place a bet to support their favourite team, whatever the expected outcome at the other a tiny minority who make a living by exploiting every mistake, mis-step or late move the Bookmakers make. This is a domain where the Reactive principles are vital to success: * Responsiveness - Systems must identify and act on opportunities that may only be available for seconds or less * Resilience - A single failure can wipe out several days' worth of profit * Elasticity - The number of markets varies considerably over time In this session I’ll present real-world use-cases that demonstrate how Akka has been used on both sides of this battle.