This case covers the work Mindera conducted as part of our ongoing partnership with TVG ((Television Games Network), a renowned sports betting brand based in the USA.

Overview

• Client: TVG
• Industry: Gaming
• Project type: Web development, quality assurance and testing, and CloudOps
• Tech used: AWS

About TVG

TVG is a sports betting site and television network based in Hillsboro, Oregon, USA, that specialises in horse racing.

TVG’s website is used by tens of thousands of people every day to place bets, watch races, get expert analysis, and more.

With trillions of dollars of bets placed on the website every year, TVG needs its site to be quick, smooth, and reliable. Failing to achieve these standards could result in a serious loss of revenue for TVG.

Executive summary

Mindera worked together with TVG to modernise its technology platform. The result was a platform with the stability and technology TVG needed to be able to continually enhance its customer experience features.

Challenges

With a growing business and expanding competition, TVG was looking to:

• Continue growing its customer base.
• Execute a product roadmap, including new features and product offerings.
• Deliver a smoother customer experience by increasing its operational stability.

Achieving these goals implied taking a new approach to TVG’s systems by modernizing its technology stack, and ways of working. Achieving it meant overcoming the following challenges:

• Innovation pace.
• Scalability was hard.
• Performance and reliability were a concern.

Below, we’ve discussed these challenges in detail:

Innovation pace

Operating on top of a legacy platform, the cost of change was significant. Delivery speed and release cycle was sacrificed in favour of stability. This resulted in a slower pace in releasing new features to its customers.

Scalability was hard

With its products on top of on-prem infrastructure relying on non-automated provisioning and deployment processes, particularly during peak teams, scaling was hard and certainly not elastic. This necessitated a significant readiness effort from a large team.

Performance and reliability were a concern

The team experienced frequent incidents with higher than desirable Mean Time to Repair. Observability, particularly telemetry, was not to the desirable levels. The lack of telemetry meant that the tech teams weren’t able to fully understand how the system was performing. This led to the undesirable situation of customers often spotting issues before any monitoring or alerting.

Solutions

Enabling TVG’s technology to match the business goals was a multi-step process. The solution was clear: modernising the technology platform to enable the business to grow at pace. The platform had to be stable, so as to allow TVG to focus on delivering and enhancing customer-facing features.

This solution required a number of procedures, such as:

• Introducing automated testing on the customer-facing channels.
• Bringing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to the apps development and deployment — from building, packaging, bundling, and deployment of the apps to fully automated pipelines. This allowed for the moving of new builds to production at a push of a button
• Rebuilding web apps.
• Enabling a metrics culture by introducing a telemetry tool to monitor as much of the tech estate as possible.
• Introducing a traffic-splitter to support migrations from legacy to new. This was built to adapt to TVG needs.
• Migration to the cloud — moving from on-premise infrastructure to AWS.
• Introducing a modern log aggregation tool (SumoLogic).
• New scalable microservices architecture defined. This included infrastructure architecture in the Cloud (GCP) supporting thousands of active sessions and hundreds of wagers per second.
• Service-by-service migration to the new cloud infrastructure.
• Automated performance and load testing. The purpose of this was to increase confidence that new changes won’t degrade performance.

Results

TVG has performed strongly in recent times. Revenues and handle (volume of wagers placed) both outperformed the wider market in the three years preceding the publication of this case study.

This has been driven by ongoing modernisation of the product. A clear example of this can be seen in TVG becoming the first US betting operator to launch native iPhone and iPad apps. TVG also established a vibrant social media presence around key US racing events.

Technology is no longer a bottleneck. This has enabled the TVG to expand its product teams and innovation, without prejudice to the overall quality of its service. Peak times on main events are no longer a concern and the big events readiness effort has been greatly reduced.

These are some key highlights of the benefits TVG received from collaborating with Mindera:

• Ability to consistently and automatically release multiple times a day.
• Product/development teams build, maintain, and support their own products
• Operational awareness of the tech estate has increased significantly, with visibility on system, application and business metrics flowing all the way to automated alerting tooling (PagerDuty)
  

Looking for a tech partner? Get in touch!

TVG is one of the numerous companies Mindera has worked together with to provide long-term solutions to key business issues. If you need a tech partner for your business then please get in touch with us. We’d love to collaborate with you and help your business.