Backed by Mission’s AWS and Kubernetes expertise and best practices, 100,000 concurrent YourCallFootball users earn cash prizes for their playcalling prowess
LOS ANGELES – March 27, 2019 – Mission, a managed services and consulting company for Amazon Web Services (AWS), today announced a successful engagement with Your Call Football – in conjunction with Cantina Consulting – to support the launch and ongoing development and optimization of the high-traffic mobile application.
Your Call Football (YCF) provides a wholly unique football experience in which fans call plays in real-time by voting through its mobile app, and then see the play with the most votes run on the field by players in a live game. The company employs former NFL coaches and players, and YCF coaches package up their plays into a ‘digital call sheet.’ On every down and distance, the coaches select a ‘bundle’ of three plays to send to the fans via AWS. The engaging and patented YCF technology awards points (and cash prizes) to fans based on how their called plays performed, and updates these scores in head-to-head, league, and overall season leaderboard competitions in real-time via the app.
After Your Call Football tapped Cantina Consulting to build its architecture, application, and game logic, Cantina brought on Mission for help tackling the app’s cloud infrastructure requirements. Critically, YCF needed to ensure that 100,000 concurrent fans could reliably use the app during the weekly traffic surges when games are played (while seeing minimal traffic otherwise). To make things more challenging, the app’s users all vote for plays via the YCF app during the same 10-second windows – with up to 100 such windows per game – creating intense bursts of usage. Any lag, service delay, or timed-out request could cause a vote to go uncounted, jeopardizing the fan experience and chances to win prize money.
To ensure a highly available app that would perform consistently, Mission began by implementing Terraform for infrastructure-as-code, and used it to quickly deploy infrastructure to YCF’s AWS environment. Importantly, this included Kubernetes as its solution for container management and scaling. Mission also leveraged Amazon RDS as a powerful cloud database solution appropriate for YCF’s performance needs, and Amazon ElastiCache for seamless deployment of in-memory data across thousands of users at once – enabling the app to run smoothly during high-volume voting activity. Mission also built an elastic load balancing system to prepare load balancers ahead of these load spikes, further supporting smooth user experiences.
With Mission’s Kubernetes-with-AWS implementation and other strategic cloud solutions in place, YCF’s AWS environment is optimized for speed and performance, and continues to deliver an experience to football fans unlike anything else. YCF intends to continue to leverage Mission’s cloud expertise and support as it scales with upcoming seasons.
“As innovators striving to execute Your Call Football’s exciting and truly unprecedented concept, we needed absolutely trustworthy cloud experts supporting and helping build our infrastructure,” said Julie Meringer, President, Your Call Football. “With as many moving parts as Your Call Football has – from the live games to the backend to the app in the hands of fans – everything must work correctly, and the fan experience is everything. Mission has been incredible in making sure what we provide our fans is exactly as intended.”
“AWS and Kubernetes are immensely powerful technologies and very well-suited to meeting the scalability needs of a high-demand application like Your Call Football,” said Jonathan LaCour, CTO, Mission. “We’re proud of the work we’ve done to implement and optimize the cloud infrastructure behind YCF’s mobile game experience, and look forward to continuing to execute on best practices to its cloud environment for many seasons to come.”
Customers can connect with Mission and explore its offerings – including free on-demand consultations with AWS-certified solutions architects – at missioncloud.com
About Mission
Mission is a trusted managed services provider and consulting partner for businesses using – or migrating to – Amazon Web Services (AWS). Through its dedicated team of expert cloud operations professionals and solutions architects, Mission delivers a unique breadth and depth of AWS-recognized technical and strategic proficiencies. Mission combines this know-how with an anything-is-possible belief in the power of cloud transformation through AWS, and a dedication to understanding and solving customers’ individual goals and challenges – enabling their development of new and powerful applications running on the AWS Cloud. Follow Mission onTwitter and LinkedIn.
About Your Call Football or Your Call, Inc
Based in Newton, Mass., Your Call Inc. puts fans in control of live games, transforming spectator sports into interactive, social and competitive experiences, a concept originated by industry luminary George F. Colony in 2013. Privately held, the company’s leadership team is comprised of executives from the technology, digital and sports industries. Your Call Inc.’s proprietary, patented technology delivered a fan-controlled, live sports experience, Your Call Football, in 2018. For more information, visit www.yourcallfootball.com.
