Case Study: Fanatics powers always-on ecommerce at scale with ScyllaDB

Fanatics Relies on ScyllaDB to Power Always-On Ecommerce for Millions of Fans

Fanatics, the online retailer powering ecommerce for major sports leagues, teams, and media brands, needed a way to scale its mobile-first platform after outgrowing its on-premises SQL Server/MySQL stack. Its Cassandra-based architecture ran into serious issues with wide-row cart mutation data, GC pauses, CPU spikes, and client timeouts, especially during peak traffic.

ScyllaDB provided the solution by replacing Cassandra and reducing Fanatics’ cluster from 55 nodes to 12, dramatically lowering EC2 costs and operational overhead. With ScyllaDB, Fanatics eliminated the timeouts seen by end users, handled nearly 280,000 IOPs in a peak minute on a 3-node cluster with zero timeouts, and cut rolling restart times from 5–8 hours to less than an hour.

Fanatics

Niraj Kothari

Platforms Engineering