Optimizing Content Delivery on Slower Networks Without Losing Quality 

Background

Goat Interactive wanted to improve the user experience for their African sports betting customers. In Africa, most users access the websites via older Android mobile phones using Edge, 2G and 3G networks, where speed is much slower than European customers’ experience. 

Goat Interactive reached out to Symphony Solutions as a company with a proven track record for delivering high quality, performant solutions in the iGaming market and a background in building excellent online experiences. 

Client

GOAT Interactive is a part of the Editec Group. Its goal is to become the number one operator in the African market. It aims to fuse the world of football and betting, creating an authentic, highly engaging community of sports fans who love the thrill of a bet. The brand is closely partnered with renowned football club brands and leverages these partnerships to provide a unique player experience, enabling GOAT to provide unique betting propositions, content and events to the rapidly growing African market – an experience that brings fans closer to clubs, leagues, and the sport they love.

Challenge

The main challenge was in delivering relevant content across slower networks, while ensuring that the solution delivers an engaging customer experience. In addition, the client required it to: 

• be flexible and adaptable to changing business needs in the mid-term to long-term future, 

• factor in future business requirements and support multiple languages (English, French, Portuguese and Swahili), currencies, brands, and partners, 

• support the ability to customize the layout and offering of the front-end sites to more localized content depending on the market. 

A future challenge will be supporting Opera Mini browser on low-end devices.  

Solution

Based on the requirements received, Symphony Solutions team has been working on developing the following within our core iGaming software development services: 

• A new website for the sports betting market.  
• A new website for Casino, Lotto and other client Gaming solutions 
• A new CMS to service this website. 
• A new DevOps pipeline to create/manage the codebase for the CMS and the websites. 
• Infrastructure and tooling to support the above. This was done within the scope of DevOps development services.   

The primary challenge in the case of Goat Interactive was to design an architecture that could handle high traffic volumes, provide real-time data processing, consider end users devices and networks capabilities and ensure stringent security standards as well as take into consideration very changeable business domain and frequent direction shifts in terms of integrations and data flows. 

Let’s investigate the key architecture decisions made to address these challenges. 

Microservice architecture at GCP 

Symphony Solutions team designed a Sportsbook platform and CMS as a microservice architecture to achieve: 

• Scalability: independent scaling of each component based on player activity across different Sportsbook features allowed to handle unexpected spikes at some part of a system and effectively utilize infrastructure resources. 

• Agility: independent deploying of each system component without affecting the whole platform, overall system resilience increased with the help of fault tolerance techniques implemented. 

• Observability: each system component was covered with comprehensive monitoring dashboards, alerts, and thresholds (implemented by Symphony Solutions Support Managed Service team). 

• Cost effectiveness and high availability: decision to use Google Cloud Platform as a major cloud provider enabled us to get significant commitment and sustained usage discounts, use robust GCP IaaS and PaaS products, as well as multiple workshops and audits provided by technical specialists of Google and its partners.

High level of abstraction and decoupling 

The nature of gambling business and multiple integrations with feed providers and 3^rd parties forced us to design an architecture that could isolate and mask all integrations and avoid propagating changes to every component used. It was achieved with the following decisions: 

• Virtual grouping: implemented multitenancy for key components (CMS, Microservices) and combined them into separate virtual groups based on similarities and other factors to achieve optimal resources utilization, business impact isolation, and compliance. Moreover, it was designed in a way to move the tenant between groups easily due to business domain’s changeable nature and scale. 

• Canonical data structures and API versioning: build a comprehensive REST API for Sportsbook front-end applications with canonical data structure hiding differences between feed providers data structures and separate API versions for different provider, which allowed easy transition for tenants from one provider to another and enabled future integrations. 

• Service mesh architecture: advanced level of organizing microservices with GCP Anthos Service Mesh allowed to put multiple FE applications under one business domain and safely and effectively route traffic to dedicated group of BE services. In addition, we gained low-level traffic monitoring, advanced availability technics and best-in-class security practices. 

Superior processes, tooling, and technology stack 

We build a robust, reliable, and high-performance system using well-known and future-proven technologies, which allowed us to drive implementation by effective development processes: 

• Infrastructure as a code (IaaC) and comprehensive CI/CD: well-maintained and described infrastructure with Terraform allowed to avoid any inconsistences when deploying to production, keeping track of infrastructures changes and cost optimization implementations as well as fast spin-off of new tenants for client’s business. Custom Jenkins CI/CD system automated all possible development, deployment and testing scenarios and allowed to reduce time, costs, and possible issues at all system life cycle stages. 

• Trunk development and feature configs: minimum separate local environments and multiple feature configs and toggles allowed to speed up feature development and reduce overall time to marker for all improvements and enhancements with additional control of features on production.  

• Lightweight React SPA and Next.js low-end device optimized version: smooth and component based React application with multiple optimization technics as lazy loading, preloads and others allowed to achieve high performance metrics results, less network utilization and better overall players experience using application. 

• Java Spring microservice: comprehensive experience in Java helped to build very stable and highly effective, scalable and resilient microservices serving APIs for FE applications and processing large volumes of real-time data. 

• Cloudflare: CDN and features packed service helped implement best security practices, effectively cache data, monitor traffic at edge of our system and keep our FE application serverless with handling some business logic with the help of Cloudflare Workers. 

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Result

The new sportsbook, tailored with a user experience designed for the African market, has garnered exceptional feedback from clients and customers across multiple African countries. Continuous enhancements are being introduced to the sportsbook, with a roadmap outlining further exciting features. 

• The ongoing enhancements to the Sportsbook have resulted in its expansion across an increasing number of countries, currently reaching 15+ countries with 4 brands and steadily growing. 

• Efficiently integrated multilingual and multiplatform capabilities, catering to various devices and languages. Additional platforms and languages are in the pipeline for implementation. 

• The Sportsbook’s content remains easily manageable and configurable, allowing adaptability for diverse markets. 

• A brand-new solution for the Casino websites, boasting outstanding UI and performance optimizations, has been unveiled in key countries. Stakeholders are highly expecting to extend this product to all countries. 

• The future expansion of gaming services offered by the provider is expected to include Virtuals, Lotto, and Jackpots. 

Scalable and top-quality CMS enables customization of front-end site layouts and offerings, allowing for localized content catering to different countries, languages, and platforms.