How Hard Rock Digital built a multi-region sportsbook with CockroachDB (DAT336)

Hard Rock Digital's Journey with CockroachDB and AWS Outposts

Introduction

  • Hard Rock Digital is the online wing of the overall Hard Rock brand, which is owned by the Seminole Tribe in Florida.
  • Hard Rock Digital operates in the online casino and sports betting industry, with a presence in 8 states in the US.
  • The company's application is well-reviewed on both the App Store and Play Store.

Regulatory Constraints and Compliance Requirements

  • Hard Rock Digital faces stringent regulatory constraints, such as the requirement that bets must be placed entirely within a particular US state, and data residency constraints that mandate data to be stored in specific locations.
  • To meet these requirements, Hard Rock Digital decided to self-host CockroachDB on EC2 and use AWS Outposts where they couldn't access an AWS region or local zone that complied with all the rules.

Choosing CockroachDB

  • Hard Rock Digital chose CockroachDB for its seamless nature, lack of complicated application-level troubleshooting, and ability to place the database anywhere they needed it while maintaining compliance.
  • CockroachDB's distributed nature, lack of a single writer that could become a bottleneck, and the ability to pin data to specific locations were key factors in the decision.

Resilience and Failure Scenarios

  • Hard Rock Digital has experienced various failure scenarios, such as node crashes, network partitions, and disk corruption, with CockroachDB handling these issues without impacting the application's availability.
  • CockroachDB's ability to self-heal and maintain quorum during outages has allowed the team to sleep better at night, knowing the database will continue to operate even in the face of infrastructure issues.

Lessons Learned

  • Unnecessary decentralization of data can complicate things, and Hard Rock Digital found that centralizing certain data (like sports market reference data) in a single region provided better performance and simplicity.
  • Networking challenges, such as latency and packet loss between nodes, required the team to adopt solutions like MPLS to outsource routing decisions and use tools like Smokeping to gain visibility into network issues.
  • Dealing with sequential hotspots and query performance were other areas where the team had to adapt their thinking, leveraging techniques like using random GUIDs for keys and historical reads to improve performance.

Scaling Strategies

  • Hard Rock Digital has used both horizontal and vertical scaling strategies with CockroachDB, finding it easy to add or remove nodes as needed to handle the significant fluctuations in load between the regular season and high-traffic events like the Super Bowl.
  • The team has also leveraged advanced scaling concepts, such as segregating SQL and KV storage layers by using "gateway" nodes dedicated to SQL processing, allowing them to quickly scale compute-intensive workloads.

Conclusion

  • Hard Rock Digital's journey with CockroachDB and AWS Outposts has allowed them to meet their complex regulatory and compliance requirements while providing a seamless experience for their customers across multiple states.
  • The resilience and scaling capabilities of CockroachDB have been critical in enabling Hard Rock Digital to grow their business and adapt to the dynamic demands of the online sports betting and casino industry.

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