Case Study: Betfair achieves 30,000‑bets‑per‑minute scalable, deterministic performance with Couchbase

Betfair Placing a bet on NoSQL

Betfair, a leading international online sports betting provider that pioneered the betting exchange, processes millions of transactions daily for around four million customers across 140 countries. The company moved from Oracle to multiple NoSQL technologies to gain scalability, faster lookups, and better fit with continuous delivery but found several of those solutions (notably Cassandra and Memcached in some cases) were not optimal for their use cases.

After evaluating the options in 2013, Betfair adopted Couchbase as its strategic document NoSQL solution, replacing Cassandra and parts of their Memcached deployment because Couchbase proved fast, deterministic, and avoided cold-cache issues. The change improved scalability and time-to-delivery and now supports roughly 30,000 bets per minute across their global user base.

Betfair

Martin Anderson

Site Architect