Chess.com trusts Redpanda as its “data backbone” to power 10M+ games daily

Challenge

Escalating Confluent costs that limited growth

Chess.com is the world’s leading online chess platform, offering a wide range of features including live and correspondence games, instructional content, puzzles, tournaments, and community forums. Launched in 2007, it has grown to over 200 million users worldwide and hosts more than 10 million games daily, making it the go-to hub for both casual and professional players.

Apache Kafka^® is a critical component of Chess.com’s infrastructure. From asynchronous communication to infinite storage, Chess.com requires an event-driven architecture that is easily scalable, highly available, and capable of handling terabytes of streaming data per day to serve its players and community.

Chess.com has been using Confluent Cloud for several years. However, when they decided to bring things on-premises, Confluent simply didn't have an offering to run within Chess.com’s infrastructure or on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Furthermore, the growing scale of the business was resulting in escalating costs.

“Confluent was exorbitantly expensive and cost us more and more every year. When Redpanda came along with a solution that was performant and cost-effective, we couldn’t pass it up.”

Why Redpanda

Lower costs, infinite scale, and faster development

Chess.com sought a cost-effective solution that could reside within its GCP, eliminating overages for network charges. Ultimately, the team selected Redpanda’s Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (BYOC) solution to seamlessly migrate from Confluent while keeping the business up and running.

Other key factors included:

• Performant, reliable, and flexible solution at a lower price point
• BYOC offering runs within Chess.com’s GCP with no overages
• Smooth, phased migration that doesn’t interrupt development 
• Stellar engineering support with immediate responses

With Redpanda, Chess.com can continue building new features for its devoted community without any costly consequences. 

“The idea of building a new feature that could inadvertently trigger expensive overages was incredibly frustrating. Redpanda is predictable and reliable; we don’t see surprise overages anymore.”

Results

Smoother user experience, faster feature development, and community growth

Data is Chess.com’s greatest asset, and according to James Kelty, Head of Infrastructure, “It’s incredibly important that we don't lose that data, we can easily access it any time, doesn’t cost us an arm and a leg, is manageable and able to infinitely scale.” 

Redpanda’s BYOC data platform enables a myriad of business benefits for Chess.com, including:

• A/B testing of new features, driving accelerated development for the community
• Posting all chess moves and scores immediately after every game
• Near real-time player ratings and leaderboard updates
• Allowing players to challenge others to match and accept instantly
• Powering “vote chess” where, for example, grandmaster Magnus Carlsen plays the entire world, with 125,000+ players casting votes on what move to make to try to beat the several-time world chess champion
• Detecting fraudulent use of chess engines to identify cheaters and ban accounts

In terms of cost and performance compared to Confluent, Chess.com reports that it has more than doubled its capacity with Redpanda at a significantly lower price point, with predictability and no network overages to worry about.

“We have cut costs by at least 40% with Redpanda, which projects to more than $400,000 in savings each year.”

With Redpanda, Chess.com can accelerate the development of new features without worrying about costs. Not to mention the peace of mind Redpanda brings as a robust data platform that easily handles massive traffic spikes—like the sudden surge in chess interest following the Queen’s Gambit series on Netflix.

“With Confluent, unexpected traffic spikes came with massive bills. Now, we are prepared for whatever comes our way without being penalized for our success.”

With a fast-growing fan base, Chess.com can trust Redpanda to not only support the business as it scales, but also ensure an exceptional user experience for both new and existing players.