Bede Gaming cuts data storage costs and enhances portability with MongoDB

Intro

Bede Gaming, part of the MERKUR Group, is a leading supplier of software to the online gambling industry, powering some of the sector's biggest brands. It runs a portfolio of five globally renowned customer operators, and the company helps its partners advance their digital presence across lottery, casino, sports betting, and bingo on modern infrastructure. The award-winning gaming platform developed by Bede Gaming processes billions of transactions per year. It’s scalable, modular, and adaptable with open APIs, allowing operators to use its bespoke tools or to seamlessly integrate it with any third-party software. The platform also integrates into Casino Management Systems and loyalty programs offering what it describes as a "genuine omni-channel convergence solution."

In addition to its platform, Bede Gaming provides native app and front-end development services, as well as a robust reporting toolkit, all built on cutting-edge technology. For Bede Gaming, this demands an IT environment capable of capturing, managing, and securing massive volumes of data with efficiency and resilience. As Dan Whitely, Chief Technology Officer at Bede Gaming puts it, “Every time a player makes a deposit, purchases a lottery ticket, or hits spin in an online game, there’s a record of that transaction that we need to store.”

As part of a major ongoing transformation, the company migrated from its legacy database—Azure Cosmos DB—to MongoDB Atlas. As a result, Bede Gaming has halved its data storage costs for the same workloads, with zero performance loss and enhanced data portability.

Seeking a flexible, portable solution for greater agility

Bede Gaming has embraced the shift from costly platform as a device (PaaS) services, seeing it as a chance to rethink and optimize its architecture and deployment. There were three key drivers behind the company’s decision to migrate to MongoDB Atlas: it needed to be portable, giving it the option to deploy in different territories; it needed to maintain or exceed its existing level of performance; and ideally, a migration would reduce costs.

“We wanted the ability to deploy in any cloud environment,” said Whiteley. Currently, the company runs MongoDB Atlas on Azure, but it has the option to be cloud-agnostic or completely self-host. “There's a high degree of flexibility with a tool like MongoDB,” adds Whitely. “It's a great database, with a load of other services that we’re yet to even explore.”

The migration involved moving over a million customer records per minute from Cosmos DB to MongoDB Atlas. Recognizing the potential pitfalls of such an ambitious project in a heavily regulated industry, Bede Gaming took steps to mitigate risk and ensure confidence in the process. ‘Positive paranoia,’ as Whitely puts it. The team kept both the existing Cosmos DB environment and MongoDB Atlas live simultaneously. “We were still sending the data both ways,” said Whitely. They also conducted extensive data integrity checks after the migration and, “obviously, had the option of rollbacks.”

Improving performance and lowering cost

Carefully planned and achieved over several months, Bede Gaming’s migration to MongoDB Atlas was not entirely without challenges. Early performance degradation, for example, was traced back to Azure infrastructure: “We had to upsize and almost over-compensate for the migration,” said Whitely. “The indexing was becoming memory intensive. Adding in some NVMe SSDs (nonvolatile memory express solid-state drives) solved that problem.”

Neither were the hoped-for lower costs immediately apparent. “When we migrated, we basically over-specified the machines to do the migration as quickly as possible,” explained Whitely. Staying at those rates would not have made business sense, and Whitely instructed the team to gradually assess and tune down the clusters. “Now we can see performance of the system under regular load; it’s low compute, low memory, and we’re predominantly doing a lot of writes,” he said.

The cost efficiencies are now significant. “With fully managed MongoDB Atlas we’ve seen 50% savings,” said Whitely. By migrating to MongoDB, Bede Gaming has also paved the way to new opportunities; the company focus now is on enhancing agility and increasing flexibility in deployment, with an emphasis on accelerating time to market and delivering change more effectively. Plus, Whitely anticipates that halved data storage costs are just the beginning. He has modelled cost savings of 65 to 75% after optimizing some of the underlying discs being used in Azure and right-sizing instances further. 

“Moving to MongoDB was a slam dunk,” says Whitely. “It has great support, high performance and is a very mature and enterprise-ready company.”

Conclusion

The next phase of development for Bede Gaming is focused on unlocking greater value from data. With a solid data strategy in place—spanning risk mitigation for high-risk users to personalized content delivery—and a wealth of insights available, the company is now positioned to leverage existing customer data more effectively.

Another key priority is improving accessibility for end operators, particularly marketers. Currently, interacting with the underlying database to launch campaigns can be cumbersome, often requiring dedicated data engineering resources. The goal is to simplify this process, enabling marketers to engage with data seamlessly without relying on technical teams.

Advances in generative AI and LLM vector stores are playing a growing role in achieving this vision. By embracing these technologies, the team aims to streamline workflows and enhance automation, making data-driven decision-making more intuitive.

Ultimately, fostering a positive engineering culture remains central to this evolution. “The team has solved difficult technical problems with MongoDB, and they’ve embraced it,” said Whitley. “We’ve done one migration, and now that we have a good run-book—we’re going to do more!”