Sportradar delivers cloud-native OTT on AWS

This blog was co-written by Ing. Philipp Neuhofer MSc., Senior Domain Architect at Sportradar.

Operating within the fast-growing over-the-top (OTT) services industry, Sportradar Group AG, a leading global sports technology company, has to keep pace with the industry’s high demands.

Since Sportradar’s OTT service launched in 2016, there has seen rapid growth in demand for low latency global streaming capabilities from both viewing audiences as well as streaming origins. This has meant that Sportradar needed to grow beyond their original on-premises environment.

Over three years, Sportradar went through a two-step transformation: Initially shifting from running completely on premises to a hybrid approach with their OTT services operating both on premises and on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Sportradar finally modernized to run fully cloud-native on AWS infrastructure, to best meet the high availability, scalability, and resiliency needs of their customers.

Sportradar needed to scale their OTT infrastructure to meet growing OTT demand

As a significant player in the sports streaming industry, Sportradar recognized the opportunity to stream non-sporting events such as concerts. This opportunity became all the more important in 2020 when, due to Covid, many prominent artists began performing online. Sportradar needed to deliver high quality and reliable streams for high-load events from artists like Dua Lipa, Ellie Goulding, Gorillaz, Lizzo, Maroon 5, as well as sporting events such as the German Bundesliga and Euro Soccer.

With continued growth in demand, both auto-scaling and availability became top priorities for Sportradar. Sportradar began their migration to AWS to meet these requirements. They started with a hybrid implementation that kept their existing on-premises implementation, while allowing them the scale to handle more events using AWS infrastructure.

Moving to the new infrastructure showed clear initial improvements, a 30% reduction on costs and improved availability through the use of multiple availability zones for automatic redundancy of their services. Based on this Sportradar decided to fully decommission their on-premises infrastructure and started running fully on AWS.

Adopting cloud-native services to scale without operational overhead

Migrating to AWS provided Sportradar with cost and scaling benefits, but Sportradar still faced growing operational overhead as their workloads scaled to cover more and more concurrent streaming events.

Sportradar’s cloud-native serverless AWS architecture

Figure 1. Sportradar’s Serverless OTT Architecture.

Leveraging their experience and learnings gathered from their initial migration, Sportradar took aim at modernizing their infrastructure by utilizing serverless cloud computing environments and realized the following three key benefits:

1. High scalability: Being able to adjust every component in their infrastructure both vertically (modifying CPU and memory) and horizontally (adding more nodes to distribute service loads). Updating an entire stack using AWS CloudFormation became effortless, enhancing their flexibility with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) with AWS Fargate—which improved their auto-scaling capabilities.
2. Flexibility: Performing load tests on the new AWS cloud-native infrastructure revealed that a Fargate task takes less than two minutes to start (from being ready to accepting traffic). As an OTT service provider, handling high-load events with sudden traffic spikes at Go-Live was the flexibility Sportradar wanted to achieve and really needed.
3. High Performance: Implementing a serverless environment and eliminating persistent storage with input/output operations per second (IOPS) limits also enhanced their application’s overall performance. Sportradar’s OTT service now relies entirely on an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) multi-tier storage strategy, yielding excellent results in performance and cost optimization with a 30% reduction on cost.

Monitoring, Observability, and Alerts

Shifting to a cloud-native architecture provided benefits beyond just minimizing operational overhead. Sportradar was also able to centralize their observability tooling and gain more clarity into their operational metrics.

With several AWS accounts hosting different environments for multiple containers, Sportradar needed to consolidate their logging to get a view of their whole environment. Sportradar chose Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon OpenSearch Service for this purpose.

By utilizing AWS Fargate and Amazon ECS, Sportradar now streams all logs to CloudWatch, where they can customize and filter their error messages, combining them into log groups and streams. After setting up a subscription filter, logs can be filtered and viewed in OpenSearch Service, even across AWS accounts.

Sportradar also uses CloudWatch as a dashboard for their infrastructure. They share their dashboards with all of their stakeholders. These dashboards are displayed 24/7 on monitors in their offices.

Having established more than 50 alerts for all the components within their infrastructure in CloudWatch, Sportradar has confidence that events will not go unnoticed. The ease of maintaining alerts and subscription channels for reaching thresholds on the infrastructure has improved their reaction time from hours to minutes and reduced false positives. Access logs of their load balancers are stored in Amazon S3. Setting up a database in AWS Glue, and using Amazon Athena (a serverless query service) to query the logs and create views for reporting purposes marked the final step in achieving total observability.

Conclusion

Navigated through Sportradar’s strategic migration to AWS, and their subsequent modernization to a cloud-native AWS environment, showcases how Sportradar successfully addressed the escalating demands of the OTT services industry. By transitioning from an on-premises infrastructure to an advanced AWS setup, Sportradar has not only elevated their scalability and availability but has also established a new benchmark in delivering resilient, high-quality streaming services.

Contact an AWS Representative to know how we can help accelerate your business.

Further Reading

• Direct-to-Consumer Streaming on AWS
• Centralized Logging with OpenSearch on AWS
• Amazon Elastic Container Service Best Practices
• Sportradar
• Sportradar OTT

About Sportradar Group AG

Sportradar, is a leading global sports technology company creating immersive experiences for sports fans and bettors. Uniquely positioned at the intersection of the sports, media and betting industry, Sportradar provides sports federations, news media, consumer platforms, and sport betting operators with a best-in-class range of solutions to help grow their business. Sportradar’s OTT service, offered directly to viewers, has expanded to more than 40 different clients worldwide.