William Hill is the UK's largest bookmaker with a network of 2,360 licensed betting shops across the country. In the USA, we are the largest legal bookmaker by outlet count operating more than half of the sports books in Nevada and the exclusive bookmaker to the Delaware State Lottery.

Our systems handle 5,000,000 price changes per day, with 160TB of data flowing through our network, peaking at 464 bets per second. Many of our current systems are based on a traditional database centric architecture. Our current capacity is fixed for the major sporting events relying on more exotic hardware each year to vertically scale this monolith. Much of this capacity can be idle during the troughs of the sporting calendar. We are exploring new Architecture patterns for our sports betting system designed to scale elastically according to demand, with a soft realtime shared nothing message based architecture.

The example for this session presents an Erlang/OTP engine packaged via Docker driven by a firehose from Apache Kafka. Join us as we reveal how we replay major sporting events into our systems to tune and tune again our architecture to distribute the load over all the available cores coping with the demands of 6 million concurrent processes over a typical weekend of sports betting.