Skip to main content

VMEngine Helps Fantacalcio.it’s Fantasy Football Game Scale to 1 Million Concurrent Players Using AWS

Connect with VMEngine

Executive Summary

Fantacalcio.it migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and achieved a 30 percent reduction in infrastructure costs, a 400 percent improvement in performance, and the ability to scale up to handle 1 million concurrent users, positioning the Italy-based fantasy football brand for future growth. Started as a passion project by a group of friends over 20 years ago, the platform has grown from a simple static website with a handful of enthusiasts into an interactive gaming platform with more than 5 million registered users. Parent company Quadronica worked with AWS Partner VMEngine to build a scalable and cost-effective architecture using Amazon Aurora, Amazon EC2, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon CloudFront. 

Passion Project Goes Viral but Can’t Scale

In 1998 a group of friends who were passionate football supporters wanted to create their own private fantasy football game. They built a simple static website where teams, player values, and scores had to be updated manually. The idea was extremely popular, and in 2008 they opened the platform to the public and the site grew steadily, eventually hitting its maximum capacity of 40,000 concurrent users.

The founders continually improved the gaming platform, which by this time had evolved into Fantacalcio.it, a dynamic website running on-premises. However, the game’s popularity exposed problems in the underlying infrastructure, with users unable to access the site during critical periods. Traffic would regularly spike just before matches kicked off and stay high until the final whistle, which was the most popular time for players to log in to change team formations, make transfers, and follow their players’ performances.

The platform needed an infrastructure that could easily scale, explains Luigi Cutolo, chief technology officer (CTO) of Fantacalcio.it’s parent company Quadronica, “The database instances and caching system were not suitable for a platform that was constantly growing and experiencing regular spikes in traffic,” says Cutolo. 

On gamedays we can go from 200,000 users to 1 million users in a few seconds. VMEngine provided us with a console so we can easily schedule a large number of instances and massively scale up.

Luigi Cutolo

Chief Technology Officer, Fantacalcio.it

Migration to AWS Doubles Capacity and Encourages Growth

In 2014, Quadronica chose to work with Italian AWS Partner VMEngine to help migrate its platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS). During the Christmas break of the Italian Football season, which is around 2 weeks, VMEngine helped Quadronica migrate its monolithic platform to the cloud. It was a simple lift and shift without any customizations, but the users of the platform noticed an immediate improvement, with the site capacity now doubled and able to handle up to 80,000 concurrent users. The initial migration laid the foundations for the company’s cloud journey, and Fantacalcio.it has continued to optimize and improve its platform every year to keep up with user demand and to improve gameplay.

During the 2015 christmas break, Quadronica wanted to fully embrace a cloud infrastructure. It migrated its main database to Amazon Aurora, which offers unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. It also adopted Amazon DynamoDB, a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for any scale, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)—secure and resizable compute capacity to support virtually any workload. To maximize user capacity and improve the user experience, they also used Amazon CloudFront, which securely delivers content with low latency and high transfer speeds.

Using this new infrastructure, performance of the site improved 500 percent but more importantly, the site could now scale to match demand. “At that time we didn’t have the technical knowledge to choose and configure these AWS services and that’s where VMEngine helped us out,” says Cutolo. “We were very lucky to find a technology partner to help us make this transition.”

This combination of AWS services enables Fantacalcio.it to optimize its spending while ensuring all users enjoy fast access to the platform. During the week, when traffic is generally low (600k to 800k daily active users), the infrastructure uses auto scaling to adjust the infrastructure capacity to meet demand. But on a game day, when traffic is expected to spike 400 percent, the Fantacalcio.it team provision additional capacity to match demand. “We can't use auto scaling for everything because on gamedays we can go from 200,000 users to 1 million users in a few seconds,” says Cutolo. “VMEngine provided us with a console so we can easily schedule a large number of instances and massively scale up when we know it will be busy.” 

Fans are cheering in a soccer stadium

Benefits

Increase in website performance & platform can handle up to 1 million concurrent users

Year-on-year growth in subscribers

Savings on infrastructure costs

About Fantacalcio.it

Fantacalcio.it is a popular fantasy football game in Italy, with more than 5 million registered users. The site started as a simple static website created by a group of friends, but using cloud technologies, it has evolved into a popular, interactive gaming platform. 

Missing alt text value

About AWS Partner VMEngine

VMEngine is an Italian IT consultancy that specializes in cloud technologies. It is an AWS Partner and specialist in startups and cloud migration and cost optimization. VMEngine is a visionary company that can enhance Enterprises and SMBs to integrate cloud computing into their IT strategies. It’s approach is based on assessing the proper cloud strategy and evangelization for correct cloud adoption. It aims to provide a 360° approach to cloud. 

Connect with VMEngine
Missing alt text value