Modern Real-Time Data Platforms for New Age Gaming

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Aveekshith Bhushan, Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan region, Aerospike

1. Can you highlight a bit on the growing significance of real-time data across industries?

Real-time data has become increasingly important across industries due to several factors, including the availability of powerful computing systems, the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), and the need for businesses to make more informed decisions quickly. Few of the key benefits of real-time data architecture in different sectors are –

• Faster decision-making: Real-time data allows businesses to make decisions at sub-millisecond speed or in the blink of an eye, which can be critical in industries where time is of the essence
• Improved efficiency: Real-time data enables businesses to identify and address problems as they occur, rather than after the fact. This can help improve efficiency and reduce downtime, leading to cost savings.
• Enhanced customer experience: Real-time data can help businesses better understand their customers’ needs and preferences, allowing them to provide more personalized and targeted experiences. For example, in the e-commerce industry, real-time data can be used to personalize product recommendations or offer real-time customer support.
• Better insights: Real-time data can provide businesses with more accurate and up-to-date insights into their operations, allowing them to identify trends and patterns that may not be immediately apparent from traditional batch processing of data. This can help businesses make more informed decisions and improve overall performance.

Overall, the growing significance of real-time data across industries reflects a shift towards more data-driven decision-making in the moments that matter. From fraud protection, to serving ads to smart-manufacturing, real-tine data is crucial in delivering fast, accurate outcomes. As technology continues to advance, we can expect to see even more innovative uses of real-time data in the future.

2. What role does real-time data play in the gaming industry?

Real-time data plays a crucial role in the gaming industry. With the increasing popularity of online and mobile gaming, players expect fast and seamless experiences with little to no latency. Real-time data helps gaming companies deliver on these expectations by providing instant feedback to players and allowing them to make decisions and take actions in real time.

Real-time data is used in several aspects of the gaming industry, including player engagement and retention, game development, and fraud prevention. For example, gaming companies can use real-time data to analyze player behavior and preferences, which can help them personalize the gaming experience and keep players engaged. Real-time data can also be used to detect cheating or fraud in real-time, helping to maintain the integrity of the game and prevent financial losses.

Overall, real-time data is critical to the success of the gaming industry, as it enables companies to deliver fast and engaging experiences that keep players coming back for more.

3. Can you detail a bit on your association with Dream11?

Dream11 is one of India’s largest sports gaming platforms, with over 100 million users. With Aerospike as its technology partner, Dream11 could scale its platform to support massive user traffic and deliver real-time user experiences in the last few years.

As Dream11 relies heavily on real-time data processing and personalized user experiences, Aerospike’s high-performance multi-model NoSQL real-time database technology is a natural fit for their requirements. Aerospike’s technology enables Dream11 to process billions of events in real-time, with sub-millisecond latencies, and provide personalized recommendations and offers to their users. Moreover, Aerospike’s technology also ensures that Dream11’s platform remains highly available, even during peak traffic periods such as IPL seasons, ensuring a seamless user experience. This association has helped Dream11 to grow rapidly by seamlessly processing millions of user transactions per minute to instantly provide the desired outcome.

4. What were the key challenges that they faced and how did you address those challenges?

With the online gaming industry is growing at a stupendous rate, Dream11 faced the challenge of maintaining performance at scale to ensure data consistency and reliability. Another key challenge was the high volume of user activity on Dream11’s platform, which led to an increase in the number of reads and write requests. This resulted in slow query response times and a high rate of database failures, which affected the user experience and led to revenue loss. The third key challenge was to ensure data consistency across its distributed system, which required synchronization and coordination between multiple database nodes.

To address these challenges, Aerospike worked in the following ways –

• High performance: Aerospike’s database is designed to handle high volumes of read and write requests with low latency, which helped improve the performance of Dream11’s platform. The database uses a hybrid memory architecture that combines DRAM and flash storage to provide fast access to data.
• Scalability: Aerospike’s database can scale horizontally by adding more nodes to the cluster, which allowed Dream11 to handle increased user traffic without impacting performance.
• Data consistency: Aerospike’s database uses a distributed consensus protocol to ensure data consistency across nodes, which helped prevent inconsistencies and errors in the system.

Overall, Aerospike helped improve the performance, scalability, and reliability of its backend infrastructure, which led to a better user experience and increased revenue for the platform.

5. How have you helped Dream11 scale during the ongoing IPL season?

With its in-memory data storage and efficient data access mechanisms, Aerospike enables fast data access and processing, making it ideal for applications that require high-speed data retrieval and processing. As Dream11 experiences a massive surge in user traffic during IPL seasons, the large-scale real-time workloads are handled by Aerospike’s high-performance NoSQL database. This has resulted in increased scalability, low latency, and high availability & fault tolerance (ensuring that the platform stays operational and responsive even during peak user traffic). This provides Dream11 users with a fast, reliable, and seamless experience during the IPL season, ultimately resulting in higher user engagement and retention.

6. Who are your other key sectors and customers?

Apart from the online gaming industry, Aerospike’s key focus sectors in India and globally include:

• Financial Services: Aerospike’s database technology is used by financial services companies to power prevent fraud, in real-time trading, and in risk management applications.
• AdTech: Aerospike architecture is used to store, manage and analyze large volumes of real-time data, to optimize ad targeting and campaign performance.
• E-commerce: Aerospike’s database technology is used by e-commerce companies to store and process customer data and enable personalized experiences, and to support high-speed transactions.
• Telecommunications: Aerospike is used by telecommunications companies to store and process large volumes of data generated by IoT devices, to enable real-time decision-making and improve network performance.

Few of the customers for Aerospike in India are – DBS Bank, PhonePe, Airtel, Flipkart, InMobi, among others. Aerospike has a very strong presence in the country, with a high chance that every Indian who is online uses a service (Across industry Segments) deployed with Aerospike powering it in the backend.