Ever imagined, How IPL Fantasy League Applications deals with high Millions of requests per minutes?🤔🌟
By: Rohit Ghumare
Tags: Fantasy Sports, Amazon Web Services, Amazon, Cloud, Fantasy

We’re dealing with the top 3 Fantasy League Applications success stories in this blog which have created a huge impact on the market with the help of Amazon Web Services Dynamo DB with just a startup team of maximum of 16 people.😲

Case Study by Rohit Ghumare

Hey, Today I’m here to just share the “Gyaan ka Pitaara” for the most trending topic in current IPL season. Everybody in India watches IPL and shows their talent skills by managing the own cricket teams on Fantasy League Applications but I wanted to just ask one thing that you ever tried to learn: How they manage their huge servers? How they Render huge deployments? How they handle DevOps system?

For all of the above questions, Answer — Amazon Web Services (AWS)💎

FanFight

Cricket is arguably the most popular sport in India. In 1983, the Indian national cricket team won the Cricket World Cup, and it went on to garner a series of wins from 2002–2013. To allow zealous fans to participate as well as spectate, Akhil Suhag founded the fantasy sports platform FanFight. “We started with the mission of providing a better second screen experience and giving users better ways to be a part of the game happening in front of them,” says Akhil, CEO of FanFight. But just 2 years after the application’s launch, its hybrid database solution buckled during peak traffic of prominent matches, disrupting service for users and generating more work for FanFight’s small team. The company needed to be able to quickly scale on demand — and do so automatically so that its staff could focus their efforts on adding value to the business.

FanFight Cuts Costs by 50%, Boosts Daily Revenue by Four Times Using Amazon DynamoDB

The FanFight team turned to Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed key-value and document database from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon DynamoDB is popular in the gaming industry because it can scale reliably to millions of concurrent users and requests while delivering single-digit millisecond performance. It naturally fit with FanFight’s existing application architecture based on the serverless AWS Lambda, which executes code when triggered by Amazon DynamoDB. Using this AWS solution, FanFight was able to scale for peak traffic on game days while massively reducing costs and improving staff productivity.

Searching for Simplicity and Scalability👌

FanFight is the second-biggest fantasy sports platform in India, with nearly five million users who create teams, compete against each other, and potentially win cash daily. Cricket is the main sport, but the app also has leagues for basketball, soccer, and kabaddi, a contact sport popular in India. Quizzes engage users and diversify revenue for FanFight during the off-season.

Using Amazon DynamoDB’s autoscaling capabilities, FanFight could easily accommodate traffic fluctuations without any action or preplanning on the part of its team of fewer than 50 employees. Amazon DynamoDB would function seamlessly alongside AWS Lambda to execute code only when needed, conserving compute resources and therefore money. Amazon DynamoDB’s pay-per-usage model meant FanFight paid only for the resources it consumed. FanFight was also drawn to the fully managed AWS solution because the company didn’t have a DevOps team that could tackle software development and IT operations. “We are a very small team, and we don’t have any DevOps, so Amazon DynamoDB was the perfect solution for us,” says Tushar Dhara, vice president of technology at FanFight. “We don’t have to do anything.”

Migrating to Amazon DynamoDB Overnight👦

In December 2019, FanFight migrated to Amazon DynamoDB in less than 4 hours. A week before the migration, the company performed a successful proof-of-concept trial with about 20 million requests to test the solution and check that data would migrate quickly to minimize application downtime. Helping to facilitate the migration were Amazon EMR and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. FanFight converted its data 80 million records — using Amazon EMR, then put it into Amazon S3. From there, AWS Lambda ran the data to Amazon DynamoDB.

AWS provided continual support by supplying best practices prior to the migration and monitoring the application during the migration to detect any bumps in the road. Tushar says the AWS team was available in the middle of the night, replying within an hour or two. “Anytime I called the AWS Support team — the Technical Account Manager or solutions architect or anyone — they responded quickly,” he says. “That helped give us a lot of confidence.” FanFight’s AWS Technical Account Manager also connected the company to the right technical experts within AWS, helped identify and mitigate potential risks, and conducted AWS Infrastructure Event Management to facilitate a smoother migration. And with the help of AWS Enterprise Support, which provides 24/7 technical support from high-quality engineers, tools, and technology, FanFight knows it can get the right support whenever it needs it.

Using Amazon DynamoDB, FanFight achieved a simplified structure with one database solution rather than a hybrid of MongoDB Atlas and Amazon EMR. Now the app can scale up to one million writes per second with no service disruption. After migrating to Amazon DynamoDB, FanFight saw optimized API call response time and faster player points updates in the leaderboard. Using Amazon DynamoDB Streams, which captures a time-ordered sequence of item-level modifications in any Amazon DynamoDB table and stores this information in a log for up to 24 hours, FanFight also provided users nearly lag-free real-time transactional push notifications. Because FanFight pays less during low-usage periods, the company cut costs by $450,000 annually when it stepped away from MongoDB Atlas — a 50 percent reduction. Furthermore, FanFight increased daily revenue by four times. But FanFight hasn’t just improved its bottom line; it’s made better use of its resources. “Obviously there are multiple cases where we can use money better,” says Akhil. “It goes into acquisition retention. Processes are streamlined, so everything from support to billing moves to one common place. That takes a lot of headache out of it and lets people focus on important things.”