How the NBA future-proofed its digital infrastructure in 6 months

Every July, National Basketball Association (NBA) rookies make their debut at Summer League in Las Vegas. When the basketball universe made its annual pilgrimage to Vegas in 2025, the players weren’t the only ones stepping into a new system under pressure.

Behind the scenes, the NBA and Amazon Web Services (AWS) teams were putting a newly migrated digital infrastructure to the test. Summer League would be the first live event running on the league’s new platform, as well as the final proving ground before the regular season tipped off.

The stakes were real. The NBA had only 6 months to move its entire direct-to-consumer ecosystem onto AWS, including League Pass, NBA.com, the NBA App, live streaming, video on demand, identity services, and advanced stats. All without fans noticing a thing.

“We had 6 months to execute,” said Mark Bennett, SVP/Head of Tech Infrastructure and Operations at the NBA. “Our planning had to be tight, our alignment with AWS had to be in sync, and our requirements had to be really tightened. We had to do it without disruption.”

No simple move

“A typical cloud migration, you’re probably thinking on the time frame of a year, maybe even longer,” said Mike Lally, Senior Solutions Architect at AWS Sports. But this wasn’t a straightforward lift and shift for the teams. “You can’t just take what you have and move it to the cloud. You’ve got to optimize for the future.”

So, the teams used the migration as a chance to rethink how the NBA platforms should work, not merely where they should live. Months before anything went live, engineers from both organizations mapped services and data flows, reviewed the architecture, and worked backwards from what the future-state platform needed to look like.

“We acted as one team,” said Lally. “From senior executive level down to service level experts. There were no egos. There were no opinions that couldn’t be changed. We all came with the desire to have the best technical solution at the end of the day.”

Jesse Robbins, VP of DTC Product, Technology and Operations at the NBA, put it this way: “The work was already done before anything ever went live. We worked for months to really understand the platform, build out all of those architecture diagrams, and make sure the support mechanisms were in place. By the time we hit Summer League, we were already confident.”

Built to flex with demand

For a global sports league, scalability isn’t theoretical. Demand shifts dramatically depending on how many games are on, which teams are playing, and where fans are watching.

“The technical focus from the very beginning was around scalability,” said Dash Flynn, former Global Head of AI for Sports at AWS. “How are we going to scale a global streaming service to all NBA fans across the globe?”

The teams leaned heavily on containerization and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), rethinking not only where workloads ran but how services were structured and deployed. The architecture needed to dynamically support different levels of demand across games, regions, and distribution partners, spinning up specific services to meet the moment, then scaling back down.

According to Lally, “the NBA was already using containers in a lot of areas, and they were using Kubernetes as well as the control plane. We looked at the existing container deployments and figured out how we could optimize them for scale, for speed, and for elasticity in AWS.”

That same approach extended across the broader platform, including the API and middleware layers connecting fans to NBA digital products, plus encoding, storage, and video-on-demand capabilities powering the league’s media ecosystem.

The proving ground

Summer League was the test. Live games, real fans, real traffic.

“Summer League is our opportunity to validate the work we’ve done,” said Robbins. “It gives us a chance to test using real-world conditions, understand how the platform performed, and give us confidence ahead of the regular season. It’s really our proving ground.”

It worked. By the time the regular season arrived, the platform had already been battle-tested in production. Fans were blissfully unaware of the massive technical shift happening beneath every swipe and stream.

“By the time we hit the regular season, we weren’t still figuring things out,” said Robbins. “We had already deployed critical production workloads, and we had confidence the platform would scale, perform, and be resilient.”

The full migration was completed in 6 months, roughly half the typical enterprise timeline. Best of all, there was no disruption to the fan experience.

What the numbers showed

The results were immediate: a 40 percent reduction in latency during peak game times, a 66 percent decrease in average API error rates, 50 percent faster video transcription, and 99.9 percent uptime across core and media services.

One standout was the NBA advanced stat Gravity, which measures a player’s defensive pull on opponents. It went from taking 7–8 seconds to compute down to sub-second. That meant it could run live on-screen during broadcasts instead of only appearing in postproduction replays.

“So it could be running live on screen and showing fans just how much pull Steph Curry has on the defense, just being on the court,” said Flynn.

As Robbins put it: “For fans, good technology is usually transparent. They’re not so concerned with API errors or latency issues…They want an experience that’s fast, reliable, and gets them what they want. That’s where these improvements delivered.”

Building for the NBA fan of the future

The migration was a milestone, but the real value is what it unlocks going forward, including more personalized content, predictive insights, new AI applications, and richer real-time experiences for fans worldwide.

“What’s going to set us up for real long-term value is the great partnership we’ve built,” said Robbins. “The trust and shared vision between our teams is going to help support innovation for years to come.”

Bennett summed it up: “At the NBA, our job is to deliver ultra engaging experiences for our fans. The more we know about our fans, we can deliver content that resonates with them, create those experiences, and connect them to their teams and players. It wasn’t about a migration. It was about positioning ourselves for a digital future.”