Bet365 heads for the cloud

The UK online betting group Bet365 has reduced the latency of its in-play betting system to less than two seconds using cloud computing, reports Computing.co.uk this week.
In-play betting requires the betting provider to deliver a continuous stream of real-time information and simultaneously receive and process large amounts of incoming customer data, and Bet365 overcame these hassles by developing its own distributed computing model, where it stores all the relevant information in a private internet cloud.
“We are looking to get data from our back-office systems to all our connected web sites with as low a latency as possible,” Martin Davies, chief technology officer at Bet365 told the computer technology publication.
“We were previously using an Ajax polling system where we had to have heavy layers of caching, and as a result the minimum latency was eight to 10 seconds. It could even reach up to 30 seconds,” he added.
“The new, push system has reduced the latency to two seconds, and can now support upwards of a few million users concurrently.”
Davies said that carrying out the project in-house was a challenging and more expensive approach, but the company valued the increased control afforded by keeping the project internal.
“This project took a total of 18 months. If you do something yourself, you have more control over the end product, and we don’t like compromising.
“It was not cheaper this way, and we have invested a lot of time and effort into it,” he added.

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