The year of K at Sky Betting & Gaming

Kotlin, Kubernetes and Kafka; the newest kids on the block are all K-themed technologies. While calling this trio new isn’t quite accurate, they are definitely on the more recent end of the spectrum. For the gambling industry, Kotlin, Kubernetes and Kafka are the transformative tech driving smarter, faster, more accurate, exciting and safer experiences for millions of customers.

Go back five or 10 years, and there wasn’t a good set of open source technologies which could work together to enable rapid and safe developments in a way which was also a joy to work with.

More recently, though, open source technologies have reached a joyous conjunction of ease of development, deployment and operation. It’s notable that the three technologies we’re using have all come from companies with impressive technical credentials.

Kotlin, Kafka and Kubernetes, from Jetbrains, LinkedIn and Google respectively, have all been enthusiastically embraced by the open source community, such that they will stand on their own feet even if the originating companies lose interest.

Just last month, Google began the final step towards a completely independent Kubernetes. Kotlin is now a blessed language for use in developing native Android applications, and Kafka became a full Apache Software Foundation project soon after it was open sourced by LinkedIn. Those businesses where development teams are building fundamental future strategic platforms have the luxury of greenfield choices, allowing smaller tribes to develop their own technical strategies.

Rapid workflows

We’ve been using Kubernetes in production for around a year, with the new in-house trading engine running on Kubernetes. We chose it as a way to enable rapid workflows by our product engineering teams, who had previously been responsible for maintaining their own virtual servers and had to separately configure the surrounding datacentre components through various processes.

Kubernetes was the step-up we needed to codify all of these into one combined
version-controlled definition. With Kubernetes, however, we are able to use an industry-standard which may be familiar to anyone joining our teams, and it can be deployed via the same tooling which we use to deploy our regular software.

Kafka has found a variety of uses around SBG. We use it for promotion engines, traditional message queueing, log shipping, processing and archival of ‘source-of-truth’ events. Again, we have a central team to look after our Kafka platforms on behalf of the product engineering teams, allowing us to develop a centre-of-excellence approach.

Using Kafka gives us a great point of visibility into what our applications are doing, and how they are interacting with each other. Kotlin is a much newer venture for SBG. Our use-case demanded a language with strong type-safety, great performance (which we can achieve with a well-tuned JVM), and a developer experience which would allow our developers to cross over from their Java or NodeJS backgrounds.

Whilst tempting to go with traditional Java, we chose Kotlin due to its comparative brevity and embracement of more modern concepts. Combined, these three technologies are allowing us to develop well-architected applications quickly and safely, and then deploy them into an environment which manages the workloads in a highly automated fashion.

At SBG, we’re passionate about using the right technology for the right job, and with Kotlin, Kubernetes and Kafka we have a great platform for the foreseeable future.

[Bio] Kevin Bowman joined Sky Betting & Gaming (SBG) in 2015 as a principal architect and, in three years, he has progressed to head of technology. His background is in software development and he has worked as a senior developer and software architect for major tech companies like Orange and Sky. He also spent 10 months as head of platform for online ticket reseller Ticket Arena.