Bet365 picks Basho's Riak NoSQL solution ahead of nine alternatives

Bet365 CIO Martin Davies says reliability and stability of product stood out

Online betting website Bet365 has deployed US developer Basho's Riak NoSQL solution ahead of nine other rival solutions because of its reliability and stability, according to Bet365 CIO Martin Davies.

Davies told Computing that when the firm was founded back in 2001, it had only three web servers, one database cluster and a payment server, and since that time the firm has grown dramatically, putting an increasing strain on its systems.

Bet365 had to continually scale up its back-end database technology, which is based on Microsoft SQL Server. Five years ago, the firm moved on to a HP Superdome Itanium platform, which Davies said "worked brilliantly", but eventually it had to scale up again and so it moved on to a 160-core x64 platform.

However, the firm's back-end systems did not scale very well and it became clear that Bet365 needed a new solution.

"We considered sharding but that brings its own problems because of the nature of our applications and the way that they work and some of the requirements we had, so we had to look at alternative technologies," Davies explained.

The company identified in-memory systems, distributed caches and distributed databases as potential options, and eventually implemented a distributed database, which Davies would not name.

Davies suggested that the implementation didn't go as planned.

"It works and it is still live today but we had some problems with it so we had to look for another product. We evaluated numerous products on the market at the time - all of the main NoSQL vendors and also companies that were not in the NoSQL space but were effectively selling distributed caches. There were about 10 products and they all had their own qualities," he said.

After testing all of the products under the kinds of loads that Bet365 normally has to handle, Basho's Riak solution came out on top.

"It performed the best by being the most stable and reliable. It wasn't the fastest but it was fast enough and due to the fact that we could scale it fairly linearly we opted to go for Riak," Davies stated.

"The main thing that sold it to me was that it performed best under difficult situations. When we were causing failure deliberately, Riak was the one that dealt with that the best and reacted the quickest," he added.

Bet365 is now live with Riak for two large pieces of core functionality within the infrastructure and the firm is moving a lot of functionality from its Microsoft SQL Server-based OLTP systems to Riak's OLTP systems.

Davies explained that the betting company had help from Basho and consultancy Erlang Solutions Ltd to implement Riak, and that it was a fairly smooth transition. He added that he was "happy with the product so far".