VMEngine Helps Fantacalcio.it’s Fantasy Football Game Scale to 1 Million Concurrent Players Using AWS

Fantacalcio.it migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and achieved a 30 percent reduction in infrastructure costs, a 400 percent improvement in performance, and the ability to scale up to handle 1 million concurrent users, positioning the Italy-based fantasy football brand for future growth. Started as a passion project by a group of friends over 20 years ago, the platform has grown from a simple static website with a handful of enthusiasts into an interactive gaming platform with more than 5 million registered users. Parent company Quadronica worked with AWS Partner VMEngine to build a scalable and cost-effective architecture using Amazon Aurora, Amazon EC2, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon CloudFront.

In 1998 a group of friends who were passionate football supporters wanted to create their own private fantasy football game. They built a simple static website where teams, player values, and scores had to be updated manually. The idea was extremely popular, and in 2008 they opened the platform to the public and the site grew steadily, eventually hitting its maximum capacity of 40,000 concurrent users.

The founders continually improved the gaming platform, which by this time had evolved into Fantacalcio.it, a dynamic website running on-premises. However, the game’s popularity exposed problems in the underlying infrastructure, with users unable to access the site during critical periods. Traffic would regularly spike just before matches kicked off and stay high until the final whistle, which was the most popular time for players to log in to change team formations, make transfers, and follow their players’ performances.

The platform needed an infrastructure that could easily scale, explains Luigi Cutolo, chief technology officer (CTO) of Fantacalcio.it’s parent company Quadronica, “The database instances and caching system were not suitable for a platform that was constantly growing and experiencing regular spikes in traffic,” says Cutolo.

In 2014, Quadronica chose to work with Italian AWS Partner VMEngine to help migrate its platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS). During the Christmas break of the Italian Football season, which is around 2 weeks, VMEngine helped Quadronica migrate its monolithic platform to the cloud. It was a simple lift and shift without any customizations, but the users of the platform noticed an immediate improvement, with the site capacity now doubled and able to handle up to 80,000 concurrent users. The initial migration laid the foundations for the company’s cloud journey, and Fantacalcio.it has continued to optimize and improve its platform every year to keep up with user demand and to improve gameplay.

During the 2015 christmas break, Quadronica wanted to fully embrace a cloud infrastructure. It migrated its main database to Amazon Aurora, which offers unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. It also adopted Amazon DynamoDB, a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for any scale, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)—secure and resizable compute capacity to support virtually any workload. To maximize user capacity and improve the user experience, they also used Amazon CloudFront, which securely delivers content with low latency and high transfer speeds.

Using this new infrastructure, performance of the site improved 500 percent but more importantly, the site could now scale to match demand. “At that time we didn’t have the technical knowledge to choose and configure these AWS services and that’s where VMEngine helped us out,” says Cutolo. “We were very lucky to find a technology partner to help us make this transition.”

This combination of AWS services enables Fantacalcio.it to optimize its spending while ensuring all users enjoy fast access to the platform. During the week, when traffic is generally low (600k to 800k daily active users), the infrastructure uses auto scaling to adjust the infrastructure capacity to meet demand. But on a game day, when traffic is expected to spike 400 percent, the Fantacalcio.it team provision additional capacity to match demand. “We can't use auto scaling for everything because on gamedays we can go from 200,000 users to 1 million users in a few seconds,” says Cutolo. “VMEngine provided us with a console so we can easily schedule a large number of instances and massively scale up when we know it will be busy.”

The migration from on-premises to AWS has reduced infrastructure spending by 30 percent while also reducing the workload on Fantacalcio.it’s technical team. Previously, IT staff were kept busy maintaining and servicing the infrastructure but now they can work on higher value projects such as adding new features and promoting the site to new users. “When we need something, we call VMEngine and explain what we need,” says Cutolo. “We don't need to find out how all the services work, and we don't really care, because we're focused on our code and improving Fantacalcio.it.”

Fantacalcio.it continues to grow, with a 30 percent year-on-year increase in users, and Cutolo is committed to continuously improve the platform. It recently added new features—one allows users to create personalized leagues and knock-out tournaments between friends, and another automatically substitutes players that don’t take part in a game. With more than 3 million teams, the platform can now handle up to 1 million concurrent users. The company has grown to a full-time headcount of 20, and employs numerous contributors from across Italy to provide football insights and predictions.

Looking to the future, Fantacalcio.it plans to further improve its functionality and performance, with the help of VMEngine, by breaking down its monolithic platform into microservices. It is also investigating how artificial intelligence and machine learning could be used to improve operational efficiencies and gameplay. Cutolo says it is essential having a technical partner because otherwise choosing and maintaining the infrastructure takes up too much time. “There are so many AWS services, and the offerings keep growing, so it’s quite impossible to stay up to date on everything,” says Cutolo. “Having a valid partner like VMEngine gives us the chance to focus on our core development plans,” says Cutolo.