Serving a global community of 14 million

THEIR CHALLENGE

Providing key services to both players and clubs

Playtomic is the world’s leading racquet sports community, connecting millions of players and clubs across nearly 70 countries. Founded in 2017, the company provides a dual-purpose platform that offers club management tools alongside a social network for athletes to find partners and book courts.

“We focus on padel, tennis, and pickleball,” said Sergio Moratilla, VP of Technology at Playtomic. ”One of our most successful features is ‘open matches’, which is for people looking for others to play with. When the Playtomic system finds a matching player for you, it then automatically assigns you a court at a local club.”

It’s a platform built on service innovation and rapid responses, but the rigid schemas and complex data-definition requirements of its previous relational database were hampering Playtomic’s evolution. Updating features like automated matchmaking and levelling for players, or price setting and membership management for clubs was fraught with risk and required time-consuming backward compatibility checks.

“When you develop on a relational database, it usually involves a schema change beforehand,” said Moratilla. “Deployment then becomes a critical moment because changing a huge table in a production system has such significant consequences. We saw that deployment would be so much faster without this.”

As Playtomic grew, users increasingly relied on natural-language search to find clubs by name or location, driving the need for a separate search system alongside the main database. While this improved the user experience, it added operational complexity. Spikes in activity required manual scaling, and limited visibility made it hard to identify inefficient queries, forcing the engineering team into reactive infrastructure decisions during a period of rapid growth.

“Our core business isn’t about building infrastructure, it’s providing services to players and clubs,” added Moratilla. “We quickly realized that we didn’t want to maintain the system we had set up, and that we wanted to move it to the cloud.”

OUR SOLUTION

Ease of management that goes beyond infrastructure

Playtomic’s decision to switch to MongoDB Atlas was driven by a range of factors. Primarily, MongoDB Atlas offered a managed, cloud-native solution that provided key capabilities that were missing from Playtomic’s initial infrastructure.

“The company that manages the software also provides the infrastructure services, which acts as a powerful guarantee,” said Moratilla. “Competitors don’t provide that, and there is real value in the knowledge that MongoDB manages its own systems.”

Instead of the infrastructural complexity of managing clusters, updates, and rotations by Playtomic’s team, key processes are now completed with just a few clicks and minimal effort. MongoDB Atlas also provides monitoring tools that provide important visibility into system performance and optimization. 

“Cluster management is super simple, and I don’t have to worry about machine-level updates. It works wonderfully,” added Moratilla. “The monitoring is also one of my favorite features. It doesn’t just include infrastructure, but everything that’s happening within it.”

Specifically, if Playtomic experiences unusually high CPU or memory usage, MongoDB Atlas can pinpoint which part of the infrastructure, or which queries, are causing the problem, and then suggest ways to remedy the situation.

”When we started Playtomic that facility simply didn’t exist, and we didn’t have a monitoring system advanced enough to do it ourselves,” said Moratilla. “But for us, it’s now foundational.”

MongoDB’s NoSQL architecture is also a significantly better fit for Playtomic’s frequently changing data environment, while enables  natural-language searches within each cluster..

“MongoDB Atlas also scales with a click, or even automatically if we want it to,” added Moratilla. “If a cluster is reaching its limit, I can either look at optimizing my software or simply grow the cluster. MongoDB Atlas makes all that so much easier. “

OUTCOME

Scaling to 14 million players and counting

The adoption of MongoDB Atlas has played a critical role in supporting Playtomic’s growth from a local Spanish startup to a global platform with over 14 million users, of which 1.8 million are regularly active. 

MongoDB’s flexible schema now allows Playtomic’s development team to launch prototypes and new features quickly and easily, without complex migration processes and without the burden of managing its infrastructure.

“MongoDB Atlas Search can handle any load you throw at it, even queries that aren’t very well optimized,” said Moratilla. “We typically aim for support latencies between 100 and 200 milliseconds for our core data flows, and it’s critical that MongoDB Atlas comes in below that.”

In terms of operational resilience and agility, Playtomic can handle “emergency situations”, such as sudden spikes in demand driven by marketing campaigns, with confidence. 

Playtomic can also run its entire core system on a single main cluster. This consolidation allows natural load balancing, with peaks in one area absorbed by the wider cluster capacity, and avoids the cost and complexity of maintaining separate infrastructures for search, or fragmented data silos.

“In terms of cost, that’s obviously very good news,” added Moratilla. “Having everything in the same cluster allows us to cushion all kinds of shocks.”

With MongoDB Atlas, Playtomic’s infrastructure is also prepared for the challenges of international expansion. The business recently launched in both the United States and Australia, and recognizes that independent, regionalized databases wouldn’t work for an international community of players.

“We want the data to be global, but we need to reduce latency in those more geographically dispersed countries,” said Moratilla. “The solution is to deploy read replicas around the world, which is something MongoDB Atlas allows you to do with just one click. It’s something we’re prepared for, and I’m super happy that it’s all set up and it’s so easy.”