Dream 11 is the world’s largest fantasy sports platform, with millions of users engaged in contests related to 12 different types of sports, covering 12,000 real life sporting events a year. With Dream11, Indian sports fans can enter contests to showcase their knowledge of cricket, football, kabaddi, basketball, hockey, volleyball, handball, rugby, futsal, American football & baseball. From 2021 to 2023, Dream11’s user base grew from +100M to +200M users, and 35TB data a day. At peak usage, the platform currently handles 10.56M concurrent users, up from 5.5M concurrent users in 2021.
About the company
Dream11
Challenge
Scaling for high user engagement in real-time
In the minutes leading up to a sporting event, tens of thousands of Dream11 users engage with the platform to join contests, create teams, modify teams, and interact with each other. The activity causes Dream11 to experience a huge spike in traffic, needing to handle well over 308M requests per second at the edge. Real-time performance, extreme scalability, and high availability are key during these moments because one minute of downtime costs Dream11 $1M in lost revenue.
In 2020, Dream11 decided they needed a solution that could scale seamlessly to meet their business needs and maintain the trust of their customers. The legacy infrastructure, which used Amazon RDS as the persistence layer, suffered from numerous challenges including:
Unable to handle increasing user and data volumes
With upwards of 308M requests per second at the edge and 10.56 concurrent users at peak times, the platform was suffering from issues such as poor pagination
Inability to manage periodic data backup
The system was becoming unable to handle periodic archival management of huge volumes of data
Poor performance with mixed workloads
When the platform experienced high write transactions per second, the system experienced bottlenecks in read performance
Inflated costs with scale
As Dream11 tried to scale and grow, costs inflated and became unmanageable
A modern, reliable, high performance solution with a smaller footprint
Horizontally scalable architecture
Required a solution that could scale out elastically to higher traffic during busy months and then back to normal traffic at other timesHigh availability and strong consistency
99.99% uptime with zero outages and support for strong consistencyFault tolerance and durability
Highly stable application with no data lossSmaller footprint
Aerospike replaced both the persistence and caching layerResults
Seamless and smooth user experience, with room to expand
With Aerospike, Dream11 is now able to reliably provide a seamless and smooth user experience, even at peak usage levels. Beyond solving Dream11’s immediate needs, Aerospiike also allows Dream11 to make continuous improvements to performance as well as additionally reduce footprint by taking advantage of the newest hardware and processor offerings, such as Graviton.
1.3M reads per second
Improved scalability enables Dream11 to process records at a rate of 1.3M reads per second and over 0.5M writes per second
<15 ms latency
Transactions are processed at a low latency of under 15 milliseconds
99.99% availability, strong consistency
Reliable 99.99% uptime with strongly consistent reads and writes
Automatic sharding
Operational simplicity utilizing automatic sharding
Testimonials
Aerospike has a proven track record inside Dream11. I’m confident that we will be using it in more and more services. It is a proven reliable component... Aerospike gets the job done and doesn’t keep us awake at night.
Amit Garde, SVP for backend engineering, Dream11
