Bet365 improves real-time betting offering with private cloud

Latency has been reduced to less than two seconds

Stoke-based e-gaming company Bet365 has reduced the latency of its In-Play betting system to less than two seconds using cloud computing.

In-Play betting allows users to bet on the outcome of events that take place while a sport is in progress, such as when the next goal in a football match will happen.

This means the betting provider has to deliver a continuous stream of real-time information and simultaneously receive and process large amounts of incoming customer data.

Bet365 overcame the challenge by developing its own distributed computing model, where it stores all the relevant information in a private cloud.

"We are looking to get data from our back-office systems to all our connected web sites with as low a latency as possible," said Martin Davies, chief technology officer at Bet365.

"We were previously using an Ajax polling system where we had to have heavy layers of caching, and as a result the minimum latency was eight to 10 seconds. It could even reach up to 30 seconds," he added.

"The new, push system has reduced the latency to two seconds, and can now support upwards of a few million users concurrently."

Davies said that carrying out the project in-house was a challenging and more expensive approach, but the company valued the increased control afforded by keeping the project internal.

"This project took a total of 18 months. If you do something yourself, you have more control over the end product, and we don't like compromising.

"It was not cheaper this way, and we have invested a lot of time and effort into it," he added.