Case Study: Underdog achieves reliable real-time streaming during peak sports events with Redpanda Data

Underdog sustains 32,000 messages per second with Redpanda

Underdog, a sports gaming platform with over five million users, needed a highly durable and available data streaming infrastructure to handle extreme traffic peaks during major events like the Super Bowl. Their challenge was to ensure the platform could maintain low latency, correct order of messages, and stability under bursty demand. The vendor, Redpanda, provided its Redpanda Community data streaming platform to address these needs.

The solution involved deploying Redpanda on Kubernetes for order streaming, which provided critical capabilities like durability and sustained high throughput. As a result, Underdog sustained 32,000 messages per second with significantly improved end-to-end latency, achieving P99 latencies lower than their original P50 targets. The reliability of the Redpanda platform ensured bottleneck-free performance during stress tests, giving the team confidence for high-traffic launches.

Underdog