Superbet is a tech & entertainment company founded in 2008, with the mission of bringing exciting, technology-powered entertainment in sports and gaming to millions of customers around the world. The group has operations or tech hubs in 10 countries, with the most important markets being Romania, Belgium and Poland.
Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager, made a strategic minority investment of 175 million euros in the company in 2019. As leaders in compliance and best practices, Superbet Group is a member of the International Betting Integrity Association and the only company to be a four-time winner of the Best Sports Betting Operator in CEE award at the Central and Eastern European Gaming Conference.
Online sports betting is typically a transactional affair: log in, place a bet, cash out. So when Superbet launched its sports betting platform six years ago, it wanted to do things differently. Broadening the ecosystem to include chat rooms and the chance to follow other users, as well as extensive stats and results, Superbet turned sports betting into an entertainment experience. Now users come not only to bet, but to socialize, exchange tips, and enjoy themselves.
Building its platform from scratch, Superbet knew that running on its own proprietary technology would give it the freedom to innovate. As Superbet grew, it prioritized user experience and getting its products to market quickly over cost efficiency. With the load on its systems increasing 20-30 times in just a few years, Superbet’s cloud costs were growing faster than its revenue.
“Whenever there was a trade-off between doing something quicker or doing it cheaper, we always chose the quicker path,” explains Bruno Kovacic, CTO, Superbet. “These shortcuts accumulate over time. We wanted a partner to help us identify the low-hanging fruit and put guardrails in place to help us control our costs in the long term.”
As part of its rapid growth, Superbet undertook a number of migrations from on-premises and third-party systems to AWS. The need to get systems up and running quickly led to lift-and-shift migrations, with inherent inefficiencies. Knowing that it would soon have to optimize these systems, Superbet couldn’t commit to long periods of usage with AWS, meaning it missed out on certain commitment-based discounts like Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, making cloud costs higher than they would otherwise have been.
Superbet’s ability to make use of commitments was further limited by fluctuating demand for its services. With betting spiking sharply during big matches, before falling away at quiet times, Superbet needed to leave 25% of its workloads flexible, without committing to processing power that it wouldn’t use during periods of low demand. Superbet wanted to find a way to make more use of commitments and reduce its cloud spend, without having to make commitments for services it didn’t need.
As Superbet searched for a digital partner to help it manage its cloud spend, it was impressed with DoiT’s willingness to offer advice before the companies had begun a formal working relationship.
“DoiT really went out of its way to enable us to begin saving before we had started the full collaboration,” says Kovacic. “It offered insight into how its support works and what to expect, without charging upfront fees, meaning there was significantly less risk than with other competitors.”
Superbet also found DoiT’s knowledge of the cloud landscape useful to help it understand what was available on the market. These initial conversations led Superbet to implement DoiT Flexsave™ in March 2023, before beginning a full partnership later that year.
Automated savings with Flexsave
With Superbet needing to keep 25% of its AWS EC2 workloads flexible to allow it to scale its usage up and down, DoiT recommended Flexsave to generate automated savings while remaining flexible. Flexsave automatically manages this 25% of Superbet’s EC2 workloads, identifying compute instances that are not covered by existing commitments, and applying discount rates wherever they apply. In this way, Superbet is able to remain flexible with its cloud usage, while ensuring that it pays the best available price for its compute instances, all without having to spend time manually searching for discounts.
Building more efficient cloud architecture
Superbet and DoiT then began optimizing its cloud usage, focusing on removing the inefficiencies in its architecture that stemmed from the company’s rapid growth. Part of the problem was a lack of visibility into which aspects of its cloud infrastructure were costing more than they should and where they could increase efficiency.
“When you start working with the cloud, there are a lot of services you can use, and you don’t always know how they are being billed,” explains Renato Klarić, Technical Program Manager, Superbet. “DoiT helped us understand the most common mistakes in the cloud, such as incurring costs from enabling services and then forgetting about them.”
By helping Superbet to identify services that it was paying for unnecessarily, such as unused discs and unneeded AWS CloudTrail accounts, DoiT Cloud Reliability Engineers (CREs) helped Superbet to reduce its overall cloud expenditure.
Understanding cloud costs with the DoiT console
A key part of Superbet’s FinOps journey with DoiT centered on its use of the DoiT Cloud Analytics to help it gain clear, granular visibility of its cloud costs. With Cloud Analytics, Superbet is able to spot and understand rising costs as they emerge, as opposed to reviewing and trying to control them after the event, helping it to quickly identify savings and take action.
With Attributions, for example, Superbet can allocate cloud costs to relevant departments and projects to understand how money is being spent, and identify trends in expenditure to keep costs under control.
“DoiT’s long-term view on how to approach cost savings – get visibility, optimize, govern – resonated with what we were doing at the time,” says Klarić. “DoiT introduced us to its technology and explained how everything works, and we were able to get clear visibility of our costs to see where we could save.”
Two teams, one common goal
Superbet’s work with DoiT now extends beyond cost optimization into cloud management, with DoiT CREs helping Superbet to get the most from its cloud infrastructure. Now, when Superbet is making decisions around its architecture, such as the best use of containers on AWS, or the most appropriate databases for its business needs, it consults with DoiT CREs for insights on the best approach.
“When we speak with DoiT CREs, it’s like they’re part of our team,” says Klarić. “They’re available, they’re down to earth, and they give us direct, common sense advice. They really help us to understand the issues and how to solve them.”
Finding flexible savings with Flexsave
Since using Flexsave to automatically manage its cloud compute spend, Superbet has succeeded in covering 92% of its workloads with savings plans, up from the previous 75%.
“Now, whenever somebody provisions a new machine, or we need more compute, Flexsave immediately takes care of it and reduces the cost of that compute resource going forward,” Klarić explains. “To date, we have saved around $200,000, amounting to 21% of our all-time effective savings rate, and 6% of our total cloud bill.”
Cultivating a FinOps culture throughout the business
With the support of DoiT CREs, and self-serve access to the DoiT Console, the FinOps culture at Superbet is becoming well established. Users across the organization are now using the DoiT Console to gain clear, fast insights into the company’s cloud spends to understand exactly where money is going and make informed decisions to reduce inefficiencies.
“We didn’t have FinOps in the company at all until very recently,” explains Kovacic. “So having a trusted partner who can offer expert guidance to help us shape this function is of huge value to our business.”
A cloud partner for the future
With DoiT, Superbet can turn to CREs for expert advice on architectural decisions to develop the most robust, efficient cloud infrastructure, while keeping costs down. ”Working with DoiT is like a partnership,” says Klaric. “As we develop the business, we plan to work even more closely together, as DoiT continues to support our future growth.”
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