IPL Fever: How Dream11 serves 10.56 MILLION+ users during the TATA IPL 2023

IPL FEVER: HOW DREAM11 SERVES 10.56 MILLION+ USERS DURING THE TATA IPL 2023

Since its inception in 2008, IPL has fueled cricket fever in India. It’s when you’ll notice your dad switches on the TV right on the dot for the coin toss. At the same time, electronics stores at every ‘nukad’ are swamped by onlookers trying to get a glimpse of the score, passengers on local trains will glaringly stare at their phones and break into hurrays when their favourite batsman hits the ball out of the park!

During the Tata IPL excitement, there’s a lot of work to be done behind-the-scenes at Dream11. This time of the year, cricket fans engage with the game more than ever. Be it as spectators at the stadium, purchasing merchandise, or engaging on fantasy sports platforms. Over the years, user concurrency has also doubled. Our Technology & Product teams work around the clock to ensure our users a world-class experience on our app.

Our platform in 2022 managed a user concurrency of 7 million. This year, concurrency reached 10.56 million during the opening match between Gujarat Titans and Chennai Super Kings—almost a 50% increase since last year. We could seamlessly execute over 308M Requests Per Minute (about five million requests per second). The ability to serve millions of users besides offering best-in-class rewards aligns with our culture tenant of being a User First company.

From the busy streets of Mumbai to the quaint villages of Himachal, we left no stone unturned to serve millions of users. Let’s look at how Dream11 makes this possible.

Small beginnings, significant  learnings

In 2018, we introduced six new micro-services just in time for the IPL. Our primary focus was to break down the monolith into a few major independent services such as authentication, user, team, contest, and leaderboard.

At that time, we were just 40 engineers who would gather in a war room to monitor the systems.  However, our methods have become much more complex today. The number of microservices has increased, and so have our automation, tooling and processes to identify issues and mitigate risk.

Challenges

During pre-IPL planning, we worked towards managing double the user concurrency compared to the previous year. Preparing for this arduous  task, we had to overcome significant  challenges:

1. The ever-growing scale of users signing up
2. Offering personalised experiences to a diverse set of users
3. Innovation in gameplay offerings to make it engaging & exciting
4. Strict adherence to compliances

Understanding the Nuances - Tech Framework

To manage high user concurrency during the biggest season of the year, Dream11’s technology & product teams took the following steps to identify problem areas and build solutions.

• Running an Operational Maturity Assessment on observability, monitoring, benchmarking performance, automation in provisioning, and reduced restoration times. We focussed on providing an overall rating on the risk score.
• Identifying possible failure modes, fire drills and getting the runbooks in place.
• Graceful error handling on the app so that the end-user experience is not impacted.
• Building automated Incident Response Management Systems.
• Creating  an Automatic  Scaling Mechanism

We have hundreds of user flows within the Dream11 application. We did a deep dive to identify the most critical flows. After this, we categorised them on throughputs and latency limits and mapped them to different software systems while analysing patterns of concurrency loads vs requests per minute on individual systems.

Adding to this, we conducted an extensive load and performance test of each service to identify the limitations of each component.

New Year, New Updates

• Launched new ‘Team Creation Rules’: With the huge influx of users playing this upcoming season on Dream11, we wanted to make our team-building experience exciting, flexible and personalised.
• Enabling Auto Substitutes: Giving users the choice to select multiple substitute players beyond the required 11. If a user selects a player that doesn’t make it to Starting 11, the app enables users to auto-substitute that player at the start of the match.
• Introduced raffles and loads of exciting rewards.
• Launched  ‘Dream Sale’ from 24th March to 2nd April 2023

Now that we have taken a look at managing user concurrency during big sporting events like IPL, let's look at other components that help us retain existing and acquire users. Stay tuned to this space to understand Dream11’s reward mechanism.