Enough with the marketing, what about the technology?

What we’re running…

As you can see from the Betfair site, there are four key products namely Sports Exchange, Games Exchange, Poker Product and a Casino. These products employ a myriad of technologies for various components, but the exchange products run a large scale J2EE application on an Oracle data base. Oracle tells us that we are in the top three hottest data bases in the world. Our J2EE application currently runs on JBOSS with a Tangosol distributed cache to manage our aggressive caching strategy.

Seeing as this is a Front End technology blog I’ll concentrate on the client-end of the Betfair systems. The front end of our application has been using an AJAX pattern since before there was a catchy name for it. The front end of the application is all ‘pull’ based and uses a polling mechanism for dynamic market information. While pull is not the most efficient form of distributing the changes on dynamic information, a push mechanism in a browser introduces another set of challenges, scalability is just one of them. Our infrastructure is highly tuned for this type of application. One of our key metrics is the requests per second for market data. The front end is made up of bespoke JavaScript libraries targeted at the high-performance nature of the Market updates and bet placement.

We currently run 2 exchange businesses in the form of the Sports and Games exchanges. We have different usage profiles for each, but they both operate the same exchange concepts in 2 geographically separate infrastructures.

Some stats:

Page impressions: 600million+ per day.

Bets placed per day:

• Sports: 5 – 8million bets per day.
• Games: 8 – 14million bets per day.