Fanduel Racing keeps the bets flowing with Kafka

Lars Temme, Director of Engineering, Fanduel Racing

The challenge

Fanduel Racing employs a microservices architecture to deliver feature enhancement at pace and to provide the backbone of resiliency and reliability demanded in the betting world. This relies on a series of service-to-service communications that support the various user journeys making up the customer experience of its web and mobile betting applications. Any break in these communications means a poor experience for its customers which translates very quickly to revenue loss.

This is particularly damaging when a bet is being placed. Any interruption can deter a player from continuing, resulting in lost bets and weakening loyalty. As a result, the horse racing experts were keen to bring added resiliency to the technical architecture, to minimise breaks in service-to-service communication.

The solution

Mindera’s dedicated software development tram collaborated with Fanduel Racing to overcome this challenge by implementing an event bus architecture. An event bus manages the distribution of events or requests from multiple players as they journey through the functions of a betting application, which can be scaled independently based on workload requirements. It essentially solves the problem of how microservices communicate with each other in a failsafe way, acting as the hub holding everything together.

Making things more complicated in this case were factors such as service discovery, network disconnects, and multiple instances of the same microservice which compounded to affect performance. Mindera identified that the problems could be overcome by implementing a distributed solution with Kafka. Kafka also has inherent, within-architecture sequencing – something that’s really important for finance-critical services.

The result

Kafka has proven an essential component in Fanduel Racing’s betting application ecosystem. Its implementation means that Fanduel Racing’s services continue talking to each other, doing so in a sophisticated way that happens pretty much autonomously. As a result, Fanduel Racing’s data flows uninterrupted through the network of microservices with no loss of transactions.

Kafka implementation has also provided Fanduel Racing with the following ancillary benefits: More even flow of traffic because there are rate ceilings in place, which reduces latency and makes for a more responsive user experience. The ability to replay and revisit scenarios ‘after the fact’ because messages are stored, not destroyed.

• $72.5m accumulative revenue handled throughout the day, up 24% on 2023)
• 24.8% market share for Fanduel Racing, up 3.1% on 2023)
• 600+ wagers a second (peak on the most relevant race)
• 2000+ registrations a minute (peak on the most relevant race)
• $5m of promotions payouts
• 3min average payout time

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About Fanduel

Fanduel Racing is an Oregon-based betting site and television network that’s synonymous with horse racing in the USA. With trillions of wagers placed every year, Fanduel Racing relies on its top-class infrastructure and reporting tools to keep performance on track and deliver a great service for its customers.