Overview
Sportsbet is a leading digital e-commerce business in the online wagering sector, which sought Mantalus’ help to undertake a Cloud Migration to support platform modernisation.
Sportsbet was seeking to bring ‘Same Game Multi’, a new team sport betting product to market. The application it was platformed on, Lightyear, required further infrastructure support to provide the agility required to deliver on the product promise.
Mantalus was engaged to undertake a cloud migration to modernise and streamline the build and deployment process for Lightyear, providing platform stability and future scalability.
Background
With a share of over 25% of Australia’s online wagering market, Sportsbet employs over 700 staff across Melbourne, Sydney, and Darwin. Licensed In the Northern Territory, Sportsbet is wholly owned by Paddy Power Betfair (PPB), a leading international sports betting and gaming operator listed on the London Stock Exchange and part of the FTSE 100 index. Sportsbet positions itself as a key partner to Australian sport and racing and is committed to ensuring that Australia has the best, socially responsible wagering industry in the world. Sportsbet is highly regarded for its market-leading brand and content, with innovative use of social and digital channels.
Challenge
Sportsbet has remained at the leading edge of the online gaming industry, through years of investment in product development. One of its more recent developments is the ability to combine multiple wagers placed on a single sporting event – known simply as ‘Same-Game-Multi’. This product is focused on team sports where multiple singular betting products are available, and through innovation, can be combined into a single multi-result wagering opportunity. The platform enabling this capability is Lightyear, an application developed in-house for Sportsbet. The application utilises discrete deployment of their Lightyear platform for each of their targeted Same-Game-Multi sports.
The overall goal of Sportsbet’s strategy is to achieve zero data centre footprint, however, each application’s journey to cloud must be assessed using appropriate methodologies to ensure ROI continues to be achieved for the cloud program overall.
The Lightyear platform, when hosted on-premises, has historically struggled with agility, meaning that improvements and innovation on the platform were slower than the business had envisaged. This was mainly due to infrastructure capacity restrictions, and the lack of modern CI/CD processes.
Solution
Sportsbet engaged Mantalus to assist in its cloud migration journey, based in-part on Mantalus’ collaborative approach to migrations, aligning with Sportsbet’s strategy of utilising a combination of in-house resource up-skilling, and AWS Partner resources to provide leadership and expertise. Mantalus began its contribution to the Sportsbet AWS journey by helping to refactor each of the discrete Lightyear sport platforms into a repeatable and immutable AWS infrastructure stack. Mantalus both modernised and streamlined the build and deployment process for the platform by integrating version-controlled CloudFormation templates with application code deployables. By combining AWS services; Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Relational Database Service (RDS), Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) and Simple Notification Service (SNS), and Amazon CloudFront the Lightyear applications were set up for future scalability as part of their migration journey.
Key Solution Elements
Mantalus’ custom AWS infrastructure solution
Outcomes
Since joining the Sportsbet Cloud Program, Mantalus has made an impact on both the direction and velocity of the program. Along with performing tidy up of newly introduced ‘cloud technical debt’, Mantalus has streamlined toolsets and processes for the assessment, design, build and deployment of all applications in scope for the Program. For the Lightyear application set, the refactoring of the platform to AWS native services delivered specific outcomes defined as in-scope by Sportsbet, as well as additional benefits not initially considered by the internal Sportsbet stakeholders.
Rupesh Kapadia, Head of Infrastructure and Operations at Sportsbet commented on the successful outcomes Mantalus delivered during the Lightyear engagement; ‘We have utilised several highly regarded AWS Partners early in our cloud migration journey. But now those vendors all look to Mantalus for direction because of their industry-leading capability’.
Ongoing Managed Services and Operational Oversight
Mantalus Managed Services (MMS) is our class-leading, bespoke cloud managed service capability, based on five key operational pillars; Security, Availability, Efficiency, Resiliency and Compliance. For various reasons, Mantalus customers choose to implement a level of ongoing assistance and oversight from the Mantalus team, to ensure critical platforms and environments are well protected with appropriate monitoring, alerting and SLAs
In this instance, after a post-project period of hypercare, the customer elected to engage our MMS service for an ongoing annual support and managed services contract, so supplement their incumbent team, as they continue to upskill and enhance internal capability and shift more DevOps practices in-house over time.
Why Mantalus?
Mantalus’ capability is built on being the tip of the spear to solve difficult and unique problems with AWS technology. Our strength is based on having consultants with an array of industry experience, who have themselves faced a litany of complex, business critical, technology roadblocks; and found creative and class-leading ways to solve them.
We’re great at developing AWS centric architectures, where none have existed before. Think platforms or middleware that have never been attempted on AWS by anyone; or even completely AWS native solutions, removing the need for expensive 3rd party solutions.
So, where can we be useful and important to you? Anywhere there’s pain.
When you’re scratching your heads with a tricky use case that doesn’t fit neatly into a known solution or reference architecture…. think Mantalus. We’re the cure!
AWS has a fantastic array of services – and if you partner with Mantalus we can use them to help you solve just about anything.
Mantalus Partner Organisations
Mantalus provides a diverse range of solutions to deliver AWS cloud-based modernisation for any business. Our Mantalus partner organisations enable us to implement solutions that meet the unique and complex needs of our clients, no matter the challenges present.
