A Dream11
success story

Scaling handles massive traffic spikes with ease

The need

Known to amplify fan’s engagement with sports, Dream11 has experienced tremendous growth, from 1 million users in 2014 to over 80 million at the close of 2019. Based on real-world sporting events, users join fantasy contests that are automatically generated and promoted by Dream11 through the app. Each contest can have as few as two participants to upwards of tens of millions that can join up until the real-world event begins.

With the majority of user traffic spiking the hour leading up to the real-world event, the original application architecture could no longer process the tens of thousands of users per second requesting to join contests associated with a single event, let alone overlapping events. Resulting in participants inability to register or being kicked out of the registration process entirely. The app also strained to ensure contests did not exceed a set maximum number of participants as determined by Dream11 while creating the contest. If over, Dream11 cancels the entire contest and refunds fees. This excessive demand on a system already overworked and unstable weakened customer loyalty.

The challenge

Dream11 required a highly elastic, self-healing system that could:

  • scale with increasing demand, self-heal, and maintain throughput and uptime under extreme loads and spikes,
  • integrate seamlessly with AWS, and
  • reliably adapt to growth predicted to double each year.

A tall order to fill before the Indian Premier League season, one of two peak seasons for Dream11, began in three months time. Failure to launch on time was not an option and would result in significant revenue loss.

Akka could deliver the scalability and resiliency required to handle our current number of participants and expected growth.

Mahesh Jadhav
Software Architect. Dream11

The solution

After analysis and research, Dream11 came to the conclusion that a Reactive Architecture could fulfill all their requirements.

Akka removes the back-end complexity associated with other technologies, delivering self-healing microservices that are resilient to failure and scale effortlessly. Dream11 was able to focus all efforts on building business logic while receiving the powerful back-end capabilities they required. Support and mentoring from Akka experts, both virtually and onsite, greatly accelerated its adoption. In addition, Akka provided training to other internal Dream11 teams in preparation for future expanded use of the platform across Dream11.

With Akka, Dream11 has an application that:

  • fully and efficiently leverages resources,
  • scales to meet the demands of the Dream11 contest participants, and
  • scales back down after customers have been processed into a contest and a match begins.

Dream11 also implemented Akka Telemetry for quick identification and resolution of bottlenecks in the application. Creating a highly tuned, massively performant application only possible with high-quality monitoring.

“Akka could deliver the scalability and resiliency required to handle our current number of participants and expected growth,” states Mahesh Jadhav, Software Architect at Dream11. “The reduction of infrastructure and the associated cost savings Akka provides enables teams to place focus on building features that attract new customers and enhance user experiences.”

The results

Dream11 went live with its new Contest Join app one full month ahead of schedule. After a thorough review of the first contest code and a few minor adjustments by dedicated Akka engineers, performance levels soared. Within a week of launch, the app achieved over 30,000 user joins per second with a latency of just 150 ms, well exceeding the original goals.

Since implementing Akka, Dream11 has reduced cloud infrastructure costs by 30%, gained the scalability to grow at any rate of adoption for years to come, while delivering the uninterrupted experience customers expect to receive.

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