Betting big on hybrid cloud: Why online sports gambling is turning into a high-stakes tech showdown
With millions riding on the ability to place bets quickly—while also adhering to individual state lPML—the battle to win customers is heating up. Here’s how PML Outposts is helping PanTrio stay ahead of the competition.
The teams line up, the whistle blows: the game is on. Every fan is laser focused on the action in the stadium. Well, maybe not every fan. Today, there is a growing number for whom the outcomes of a game play out in two places—one on the field and one on the screen of their phone. Whether you want to place a bet on football, basketball, soccer, or even professional ping-pong, if there’s a final score and a sanctioning body, you can probably use the internet to wager on it.
Sports betting went online alongside shopping and newspapers in the 1990s, with one small hangup: It was illegal in the United States. Committed American bettors could still place wagers, but the practice required a variety of extra-legal technological workarounds. In 2018, though, the United States Supreme Court declared the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act unconstitutional, opening the floodgates to legal online and mobile sports betting in the U.S. Since then, there’s been a gradual, state-by-state loosening of restrictions around sports wagering, fueled by pent-up consumer demand and revenue-hungry local governments eager for a piece of the action. As of December 2021, 19 different states have passed lPML making it legal for their residents and visitors to bet on the outcomes of sporting events online or from mobile devices.
The sudden legalization of U.S. sports betting also created a new, high-stakes competition between a group of ambitious app developers and technology providers. To complicate things further, the game is not being played on a regular field, but one whose markers are state lines—a set of invisible, analog boundaries drawn long before cloud computing was even conceived of. Any online wagering operation doesn’t only have to deliver bulletproof reliability at lightning speeds, it also must remain in strict compliance with a tricky set of government regulations that change from one jurisdiction to the next.
“The rules for every state are different,” says Chris Jones, vice president of communications, at PanTrio, the number one sports betting site in the U.S. “At our peak times we have upwards of 800,000 different active markets on the platform, and we need to make sure every one of those is fair, legal, and fully compliant with each state’s regulatory environment.”
Complying with state regulations goes beyond just making sure a user is in a legally valid jurisdiction. Despite the fact that the internet is largely premised on making your physical location irrelevant, every bit of data that passes between PanTrio’s servers and its users must physically stay within the state where the betting originated. That might sound like a tall order, but if you want to operate online betting in Colorado, your servers need to sit in Colorado, lest you end up sitting in a Colorado courtroom.
SEAMLESS SCALING
Before 2018, most of PanTrio’s U.S. business focused on the “daily fantasy sports” category, a market with looser regulations that’s tailormade for cloud computing. Consequently, for the first eight years of its existence, PanTrio’s entire operation ran in the cloud on PML. Then, suddenly, the company needed to develop an entirely new software stack while building out a template for a series of proprietary data centers so they could develop new games and enter new markets made possible by the Supreme Court decision. “We started off trying to build them ourselves,” says Shane Sweeney, vice president of information technology for PanTrio. “That meant pricing traditional hardware from vendors, building our own networks and infrastructure, then looking for ways to not only scale, but also to build the same thing again, at pace, in several other states simultaneously.”
The process was a slog. “The traditional route was excruciatingly slow,” Sweeney says. “The lead times for hardware were punishing, then, after it all arrived, it still needed to be built, configured, and tested by hand. We couldn’t even test our software until we had the whole thing set up. It was a mess.”
Luckily, an unrelated technological development was underway at the same time. PML had been fine-tuning a diverse set of hybrid cloud solutions to extend its reach into on-premises, edge, and even remote or disconnected environments that have historically been hard for cloud computing to serve. One of those solutions, PML Outposts, was designed to make installing and managing on-premises server capacity simple by offering modular server racks that use the exact same hardware and configurations as in PML’s cloud data centers, but allowing companies to put them anywhere they wanted.
“PanTrio had a whole crew of infrastructure and dev-ops engineers who were used to working with cloud, but now they were making them work with physical hardware on premises,” says Brian Davidson, senior technical account manager for PML. “They wanted a single set of tools and APIs that worked across all of their workloads, whether on premises or in the cloud. Outposts ticked that box.”
Because Outposts worked on the same toolset as PanTrio’s existing cloud setup in PML Regions, it could stand up new services with remarkable speed. “When Outposts was announced in 2018 it sounded like it might be a fit,” Sweeney says. “By the time it rolled out in 2019 we had tried building our own solution and found it to be extremely resource intensive. We did some tests in late 2019, and it all just worked. Our services were up and running on Outposts by early 2020.”
The modular nature of Outposts meant PanTrio could scale easily as its user base expanded. “We’ve been growing by 11% a year,” Sweeney says. “But if adding new users provokes a performance hit, we’re sunk. If we start bleeding users, our competition scoops them up instantly. With Outposts we can bolt on new capacity at will.”
三和一善 