DraftKings Scales Its Financial Ledger with Amazon Aurora for Seamless Sports Betting

Founded in 2012, DraftKings offers online sports betting services, daily fantasy sports contests, and iGaming solutions for an average of 3.1 million unique customers per month as of Q2 2024. It provides retail and mobile sports betting in 27 states, Washington, DC, and Ontario, Canada. DraftKings’ daily fantasy sports product is available in 44 states, certain Canadian provinces, and the United Kingdom. Central to these operations is the DraftKings financial ledger, which tracks each user’s balance and moves money between various accounts depending on bets placed and event outcomes.

“The bigger the event, the more customers have either wagered on or entered contests related to it,” says Joel Miller, principal software engineer at DraftKings. “The write workloads spike up significantly around payout events, but opening the app during the game also activates a lot of balance queries, which means more read traffic.”

As the company’s operations expanded, it needed a more robust, scalable database solution that could handle these demands. When Aurora was released, DraftKings found that it was an optimal choice for its growing environment.

“At the time that Aurora came out, it touted input/output performance that was 18 times better compared with other database solutions, as well as the ability to very quickly provision read replicas with more capacity,” says Dan White, lead software architect at DraftKings. “As soon as it was available, we adopted Aurora for our ledger, and we’ve been running on it ever since.”

DraftKings adopted Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition as the core database system for its financial ledger. Over time, DraftKings has grown to over 200 individual databases based on its workload requirements.

With Aurora, DraftKings can effectively manage the intense read and write operations that are typical during peak traffic times, with minimal delay. “Instead of 30 seconds of replication lag during high volume periods, we might see 10–30 milliseconds using Aurora,” says White. “The ability to dynamically and very quickly provision new read replicas empowered us to break through many of the scaling and traffic handling challenges that we initially faced.”

As its operations grew, DraftKings adopted new Aurora features as they were released. For example, database cloning is used to quickly create copies of the company’s databases, facilitating rapid testing and development without disrupting the live environment. This lets DraftKings experiment with changes in a safe, reliable manner before applying the changes to the production database.

Using Aurora Replicas, DraftKings efficiently manages the large volume of read operations generated when users query their account balances and transaction histories. By distributing read traffic across multiple replicas, the company maintains high availability during peak events. The Aurora I/O-Optimized feature, released in May 2023, has helped enhance read/write throughput per instance. With this solution, the primary database can handle input/output demands more efficiently and facilitate low latency for fast, seamless user interactions.

DraftKings benefits from Aurora’s enhanced security features, including automatic encryption of data in transit and at rest, and fine-grain access control policies. Aurora also offers storage resiliency by making data durable across three Availability Zones; the company only needs to pay for one copy.

During the Super Bowl, the final game of the National Football League season, DraftKings sees a significant surge in user activity. Financial ledger traffic at its peak is approximately 50 percent higher than in the first week of the season, which is also a popular betting period. With Aurora, the company gains the scalability and performance necessary to manage this increased load. The system can efficiently process users’ requests so that their interactions remain fast and reliable—even during the game’s most critical moments.

“During the 2024 Super Bowl, the load increases did not impact our database’s throughput or latency metrics,” says White. “Aurora handled the traffic scale, no sweat. We were very happy with the number of financial operations per minute that we achieved.”

The Aurora cluster powering DraftKings’ financial ledger successfully handles 1 million operations per minute, combining both read and write requests. This high throughput is matched by remarkably low latency; common read operations are completed in under 1 millisecond and write operations take only 6 milliseconds on average.

Now, DraftKings can effectively manage its financial ledger during high-traffic events like the Super Bowl to better serve its users. The company can reliably handle increased transaction volumes, improving both user satisfaction and operational efficiency.

As DraftKings expands its operations, it plans to explore new markets and onboard new states and territories. “We are confident that our Aurora database will provide the performance that we need as we continue to grow,” says White.