Speaker: Chandru Mullaparthi, Chairman of the Erlang Industrial User Group; Former Head of Software Architecture at bet365. Expert industry analysis and proposal of the ideal components available today to make up a betting tech stack. A creative session to visualise building a betting stack from the ground up with no concern for a legacy, instead focusing on traditional and innovative technologies. Chandru will draw on his experience building highly available, reliable, and concurrent systems for the online gambling & betting industry to outline his dreamteam of programming languages, middleware, operations, configuration management, and databases.

1. Alternative Programming Conference
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2. Building an ideal betting stack
Chandru Mullaparthi

3. About me
• Started programming when I was about 12
• Started getting paid to do it when I was 21
• Spent 18 years in Telecoms
• Involved in the betting industry since 2014
• Currently working on an advertising startup
• Provide consulting for Erlang Solutions

4. What would a betting stack
with no burden of legacy
look like?

5. Programming languages
truewave.io
www.erlang-solutions.com

6. Erlang / OTP
• Concurrency oriented
• Functional Programming
• Expressive
• Optimised for multicore
• Erlang is the language
• OTP is a set of applications
truewave.io
www.erlang-solutions.com

7. • Hip young offspring of Erlang
• Ruby-like syntax
• Compiles down to Core Erlang
• Runs on the BEAM VM
truewave.io
www.erlang-solutions.com

8. Go
• A better C
• Good support for concurrency
• Excellent cross-platform support
• Excellent tool chain
truewave.io
www.erlang-solutions.com

9. Middleware
truewave.io
www.erlang-solutions.com

10. Apache Kafka
• High performance messaging
platform
• Ideal glue for interconnecting
systems asynchronously
• Persistent, replicated queues
• “At least once” or “exactly
once” semantics
• Event sourcing
Source: https://confluent.io
truewave.io
www.erlang-solutions.com

11. Apache Kafka
Source: http://kafka.apache.org

12. Apache Kafka
Source: http://kafka.apache.org

13. • Generic RPC mechanism
• Programming language
agnostic
• HTTP/2 transport protocol
• Bi-directional streaming &
integrated auth
• gRPC-REST gateway Source: https://grpc.io
truewave.io
www.erlang-solutions.com

14. GRPC
• Unary RPC (traditional client-server request / response)
• Server Streaming RPCs (client sends request, servers sends a stream
of messages as response)
• Client Streaming RPCs (client writes a sequence of messages as
request, and waits for server response)
• Bidirectional streaming (like when you and your spouse have an
argument)

15. Operations
truewave.io
www.erlang-solutions.com

16. Prometheus
• Monitoring and Alerting system
• Multi dimensional data model
• Powerful query language
• Single binary - requires only disk
• Pulls metrics
• CNCF project
Source: https://prometheus.io
truewave.io
www.erlang-solutions.com

17. OpenTracing
• An open standard for
distributed tracing
• Enables easy visualisation
of execution flow in
distributed systems
• Visualisation using Zipkin,
Jaeger etc.
Source: https://opentracing.io

18. Source: https://zipkin.io

19. Source: https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/

20. Configuration Management
truewave.io
www.erlang-solutions.com

21. • Distributed Key/Value store
• Useful as a centralised
configuration store
• Ability to push updates to
config
• Useful to implement
distributed coordination
truewave.io
www.erlang-solutions.com

22. Databases
truewave.io
www.erlang-solutions.com

23. PostgreSQL
• High performance
• Large installed base
• Actively developed
• License free!
truewave.io
www.erlang-solutions.com

24. Riak KV
• Distributed NoSQL database
• Various control levers to tradeoff
consistency for availability
• Built-in CRDT support!
• Based on Amazon’s dynamo
paper
• Multi datacenter replication to be
available as open source soon!
truewave.io
www.erlang-solutions.com

25. Erlang/Elixir
Publishers
Bet Placement
Settlement
Session Management
Wallet APIs
Cash out
Liability calculations
Golang
Data transformation tools
Operational utilities
C#
Customer support apps
Back office tools
Trader tools
PostgreSQL
Customer Subscription Data
Bets (active / settled)
Wallet
Prometheus
Kafka
Riak
Bets (active / settled)
Wallet

26. THANK YOU
Any questions?
Chandru Mullaparthi
CTO @ TrueWave