Why Dream11 wants to float in the cloud, IT News, ET CIO

Dream Sports and its brands such as Dream11, FanCode, Dream Capital have a collective user base of over 140 million. To cater for such a huge user base with peak concurrency reaching up to 5.5 million and above, the cloud became a very obvious choice for the organization from the start. With so much traffic data, every decision is data driven and cloud adoption ensures that this goal is achieved seamlessly.

“With the hyper-growth that we were (and see) year on year, we needed a large scale solution that can be resilient based on our traffic patterns and data volumes. We were also looking to get a reliable, ready-to-use software / infrastructure as a service so that we could focus on our core product. Cloud Technologies did the job perfectly, ”said Abhishek Ravi, CIO, Dream Sports.

According to Ravi, some key aspects taken into account when choosing the cloud are scalability, elasticity, performance, reliability, resiliency, security and cost.

Most of Dream Sports’ application workloads are in the cloud. Dream11 mainly works on Amazon Web Services. However, the company is also using (and exploring) other cloud services for other companies and Dream Sports use cases.

“The cloud has really helped us plan, develop and evolve our product without worrying about performance, availability and cost of ownership. We could quickly test our features, scale the tests in load / stress environments and send them to our users to give them the best experience. With managed services available in the cloud, our teams could and continue to focus on core products and thus derive maximum efficiency, ”added Ravi.

The company also intends to remain cloud-native in the future. “With our data volumes increasing day by day and new solutions evolving in the cloud space, we want to make optimal use of the cloud. “

The company’s strategy is multi-cloud because it selects the right solution for the different use cases according to the needs.

Ravi believes that a multi-cloud strategy needs to be well thought out so that the best cloud technology for the right use case can be provisioned. It also makes it possible to optimize the infrastructure and therefore the cost.

“For us, our multi-cloud strategy pushes us to make a“ Cloud Agnostic ”architecture which is very important to reduce unwanted expenses, create two centers of excellence, etc. We are making a conscious effort in this direction. This helps us design the best from the start, based on our scale and requirements. Therefore, we are seeing good optimization on all fronts, ”he said.

Over the next few months, Dream Sports aims to intensify its technological advances and expand its technological infrastructure.

“We are leveraging big data, analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning to focus on all aspects that improve sport. We are heavily experimenting with the push architecture to deliver information to users in real time. We are also very advanced on containerization, which has significantly reduced our infrastructure needs, ”said Ravi.

The company has also undertaken several technology initiatives such as a concurrency prediction model to predict hourly concurrency on the Dream11 platform and a fraud detection system to identify and mitigate users creating multiple / duplicate accounts on the platform for abusing referral or promotional cash bonus programs.

To ensure a quality user experience during peak traffic, Dream Sports also tests every feature released for a smooth experience at scale. “We have a test framework that simulates any type of traffic load with realistic models. This gives a high degree of assurance that the backend will behave exactly as expected, ”added Ravi.