Sportsbet Modernizes Core Workloads on AWS Serverless to Boost Scalability, Efficiency, and Sustainability

Sportsbet is known for leading the Australian digital wagering market through technology-driven innovation. To stay ahead in a fast-evolving landscape, the company needed to modernize its platform to support rapid growth, rising customer expectations and complex data workloads. This included telemetry, betting activity, and business intelligence reporting. During major events like the Melbourne Cup, the platform processes over 63,000 bets per minute. To maintain performance, Sportsbet required capacity that could scale reliably and quickly to meet peak traffic demand.

As Sportsbet scaled, maintaining its legacy infrastructure became increasingly resource-intensive. Engineering teams spent significant time on manual tasks such as capacity management, system updates, and routine maintenance. This reduced the team's capacity to deliver new customer features and respond quickly to shifting demand.

To strengthen its leadership in digital wagering, the company undertook a strategic platform transformation to streamline operations, improve scalability, and free up engineering capacity. This shift accelerated the delivery of customer-driven features and reinforced Sportsbet's focus on long-term sustainability, in line with Flutter Entertainment's Positive Impact Plan.

Through its multi-year Cloud Evolution and Engineering Excellence program, Sportsbet refactored its core platforms using AWS serverless technologies. The transformation enhanced automation, scaling, resilience, and monitoring. By dynamically matching compute capacity to real-time demand, the serverless architecture improved resource efficiency and helped reduce operating costs by 10 percent. Furthermore, with an architecture that incorporated AWS Graviton instances, Sportsbet reduced its energy consumption during processing tasks, which in turn contributed to a 38 percent reduction in overall compute-related emissions.

The company utilized AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers, to run approximately 80 percent of its workloads.  This provided operational efficiency by eliminating server management, reducing exposure to security vulnerabilities, and removing the need for infrastructure patching and maintenance that could introduce security risks. During event-driven traffic spikes – such as the surge in customer demand that exceeded forecasts during the Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson boxing match – AWS Fargate was also able to scale automatically to help Sportsbet maintain seamless customer experiences. AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service is also used to support event-driven workloads across the platform.

To manage dynamic workloads across the database layer, Sportsbet implemented Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) with Amazon Aurora Serverless, which adjusts database capacity in real time to meet performance, cost and operational goals. For internal communication across teams and applications, the company integrated Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK), a message streaming service that supports daily operations as part of Sportsbet's application architectures.

The company extended their use of Amazon QuickSight, a business intelligence tool, to develop dashboards for monitoring operational metrics and tracking cost performance, replacing costly, proprietary software. Sportsbet combined these services to build a scalable, low-maintenance environment that enhanced system efficiency and reliability. Engineering teams used these insights to monitor platform health and optimize resource allocation.

As part of its ongoing platform optimization, the company adopted AWS Graviton processors across a range of workloads – including AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, Amazon RDS, and Amazon Aurora – after identifying clear gains in performance and efficiency. Sportsbet developed an architecture that incorporated AWS Graviton instances to achieve up to 40 percent better price-performance and 60 percent lower energy consumption compared with traditional x86 processors. The reduced energy consumption is in line with Flutter Entertainment's broader sustainability goals.

With a scalable and efficient foundation on AWS, Sportsbet is now exploring generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to drive personalization and operational efficiency. The company will also continue to expand its analytics capabilities using Amazon QuickSight and Amazon Athena to generate richer insights and deliver more personalized wagering experiences.

"Modernizing our platform using serverless technologies was a strategic step toward reinforcing our sustainable leadership in digital wagering. It helped us scale dynamically for major events, operate more cost efficiently, accelerate innovation through removing effort on low value ops, and reduce our environmental impact. AWS gave us the flexibility to meet customer demand, deliver consistent, high-performance experiences to our customers and provide an improved EVP," said Rupesh Kapadia, Head of Cloud, Operations & Workplace Technology, Sportsbet.