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Betclic

Betclic transforms real-time sports betting

By replacing a SQL monolith with MongoDB Atlas, Betclic achieved infinite scalability, zero downtime, and a 400ms data refresh rate.

A photo of a man playing on his smartphone.

Their Challenge

Betclic’s legacy SQL system caused 10s of data delays and operational silos, frustrating users and hindering the agility it needed to scale.

Our Solution

Betclic used MongoDB Atlas and MongoDB Search on Atlas to replace silos with a scalable, domain-driven design, accelerating time to market for new features.

Outcome

With MongoDB Atlas, Betclic achieved 400ms latency, no major incidents, and infinite scalability, delivering a flawless real-time betting experience.

Industry

Leisure

Sports and Recreation

Product

MongoDB Atlas

Use Case

Modernization

THEIR CHALLENGE

The search for a more agile, responsive architecture

In the increasingly crowded and competitive online gambling and betting market, long-term player retention is the critical success factor. Achieving this means delivering a fast, secure, and seamless user experience in a highly dynamic, rapidly changing environment.

Betclic offers live sports betting, often while the event is in progress. Odds can change rapidly as a match unfolds, but Betclic’s legacy system relied on multiple cache levels and a ‘polling’ mechanism that refreshed data every 5 seconds. This resulted in an end-to-end latency of up to 10 seconds between an event occurring and the user receiving updated information.

“When you’re in the middle of a match, the user experience depends on accurate and up-to-date data,” said Pierre Bougon, Staff Software Engineer at Betclic Group. “If people try to place a bet based on outdated odds, the system rejects it and re-offers with new odds. It was unacceptably frustrating.”

This wasn’t the only issue with Betclic’s legacy architecture. It relied on a large central SQL database hosted on the largest available on-premises machines, and bottlenecks were key points of failure. For a business looking to grow its customer base and expand into new countries, this was catastrophic.

The centralized nature of the legacy system posed significant operational risks, consisting of what Bougon described as a “galaxy of microservices” all connected to the same primary database. If a single application contained a bug or overused resources, the entire platform was at risk, leading to outages across all Betclic products.

In addition, complex queries for back-office operations or customer searches were slow, resource-heavy, and difficult to maintain on the legacy SQL database. This both limited front-end functionality and made internal operations inefficient.

“The bottlenecks created organizational silos that slowed down development and innovation,” added Bougon. “We needed a more agile architecture that gave teams ownership of their own domains and infrastructures.”

“With MongoDB Atlas there have been no major incidents on the database side. It’s been in production for a year without any problems.”

Pierre Bougon
Staff Software Engineer, Betclic Group

OUR SOLUTION

Improving customer-facing tools and time to market

Switching to MongoDB Atlas allowed Betclic to replace its organizational silos and distributed monolith issues with a managed, flexible, domain-oriented design.

Specifically, instead of creating a database for every microservice, which would be inefficient, or using a single central database, which would create bottlenecks, Betclic assigned dedicated MongoDB clusters to specific business subdomains. This approach allowed specific teams to own their infrastructure, eliminating dependencies on central administrators.

“They also don’t share the full scope of their cluster and infrastructure with other teams,” said Bougon. “We have different logical databases within our MongoDB cluster, with different services able to plug in and talk to them.”

Betclic built an automated system using Terraform and AWS Lambda that triggers MongoDB to scale its infrastructure to larger clusters before matches and scales it down afterward according to a defined calendar. The company also adopted MongoDB Search on Atlas, which allowed it to define search indexes directly within MongoDB. The indexing is automated and abstract, syncing data between the main database and the search engine behind the scenes.

“Developers can use the $search operator within standard MongoDB queries to retrieve document IDs and fetch data in a single pipeline,” said Bougon. “That significantly speeds up time to market for new search features, while enabling efficient handling of complex back-office queries and improving the customer-facing search tool.”

By fine-tuning how its applications interacted with MongoDB, Betclic reduced end-to-end latency to under 2 seconds. Instead of dropping idle connections, Betclic tweaked the drivers to keep them live, enabling it to handle sudden, massive traffic spikes or up to 100,000 reads per second without the delay of reestablishing links.

“We also do a lot of bulk processing for large files, with several hundred documents to write at once,” said Bougon. “We then use MongoDB Atlas Local—which allows us to perform unit tests robustly and easily.”

“MongoDB Atlas supports the entire low-latency, real-time functionality that delivers the best possible experience to our users.”

Pierre Bougon
Staff Software Engineer, Betclic Group

OUTCOME

An outstanding user experience with unlimited scalability

For Betclic, implementing MongoDB Atlas resulted in significant improvements in the user experience, operational stability, and organizational scalability. Critically, it has achieved the speed it needs to deliver real-time sports betting with a slick and responsive user interface, and without the frustration of rejected bets caused by outdated odds.

And by moving away from a single point of failure caused by its legacy SQL monolith, Betclic has also achieved high system reliability. The decoupled architecture prevents a single application bug or resource spike from crashing the entire platform, ensuring consistent uptime for revenue-generating products.

“If we take our entire end-to-end pipeline, we have cut latency to around 400 milliseconds,” said Bougon. “That’s the level we were aiming for, and with MongoDB Atlas, there have been no major incidents on the database side. It’s been in production for a year without any problems.”

The new infrastructure removed the scaling limits of the old on-premises SQL system that were restricting the company’s growth. Now, the system successfully handles traffic peaks of nearly 100,000 reads per second and 50,000 writes per second, while maintaining a low latency of under 5 milliseconds for standard reads.

“We can continue to scale indefinitely without encountering any system limitations,” added Bougon. “That allows us to grow the number of customers we serve and the number of countries we serve them in.”

The shift to MongoDB Atlas has also driven a cultural shift in system ownership, removing silos between development teams and database administrators. Features like MongoDB Search on Atlas allow developers to quickly implement complex search functionality for both customers and back-office staff, significantly reducing time to market for new features.

“When we need different search functionalities, everything is abstract, and everything is managed by MongoDB directly,” said Bougon. “It’s a real search engine that our previous platform just didn’t have. MongoDB Atlas supports the entire low-latency, real-time functionality that delivers the best possible experience to our users.”

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