About Mobile Premier League
Mobile Premier League (MPL) is India’s largest fantasy sports and online gaming platform that allows users to participate in free as well as paid competitions across multiple categories including fantasy sports, sports games, puzzle, casual and board games. Founded in 2018, MPL hosts hundreds of millions of tournaments a month and is trusted by over 90 million registered users across North America, Asia and Europe. Learn more at mpl.us
Challenge: Migrating from Monolith to Microservices Architecture
In an effort to modernize infrastructure and reap the agility, scalability and reliability gains of modern microservices architectures, MPL set out to shift its VM-based workloads to microservices in Kubernetes. At one time, MPL was running all of its workloads on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual machines (VMs), using AWS Application Load Balancer to route incoming traffic to proper resources based on Uniform Resource Indicators (URIs). With more than 90 million gamers accessing its platform, MPL needs to be able to run its platform at scale using an architecture that is flexible, reliable and efficient. That’s why MPL joined the ranks of enterprises today that are shifting their workloads from monolithic to microservices architecture, or, phrased another way, moving from VMs to containers orchestrated by Kubernetes. Tetrate assisted MPL in this transition, using the VM onboarding capability in Tetrate Service Bridge (TSB) to manage the risks and complexity of migrating to new infrastructure without interrupting service to its customers.
In reality, the shift from VMs to containers is rarely completed in one fell swoop. The risk of failure or downtime and the complexity of migrating a whole application fleet to a new architecture and environment makes a “big bang” cutover impractical. Instead, the shift is typically made in stages where applications are migrated incrementally to mitigate risk and manage complexity.
During the transition, however, the business operates a hybrid infrastructure with some components running on VMs and others in Kubernetes. Applications and services running in both environments must still somehow communicate with each other securely and reliably across infrastructure boundaries to maintain business continuity. This can pose significant operational challenges – especially for service discovery, new deployments rollout, traffic management and security policy implementation.
Solution: Tetrate Service Bridge and Enterprise Support
To meet this challenge, MPL turned to Tetrate’s expertise and Tetrate Service Bridge’s (TSB) ability to onboard EC2 virtual machine workloads to the Istio-based service mesh in Kubernetes – to facilitate cross-boundary communication. Tetrate Service Bridge (TSB) is an enterprise service mesh solution that addresses onboarding of Kubernetes clusters and VM-based workloads into the same mesh. It uses open source Istio under the hood and adds additional layers of capabilities like centralized management, multitenancy, audit logging, workflows, a global service inventory, comprehensive lifecycle management and configuration safeguards. TSB can manage workloads on heterogeneous infrastructure layers, like running on on-premises data centers or in any public cloud, such as AWS, GCP or Azure.
With Tetrate’s help, MPL was able to modernize their application infrastructure from VMs to Kubernetes incrementally by onboarding VMs into the Tetrate Service Bridge mesh to reduce operational complexity and risk to business continuity. As part of this transition, VM-based workloads were put behind Kubernetes services along with pods while load balancing the same ingress traffic. You can read about it in our blog post: Mobile Premier League Migrates from VM to K8s in AWS with Tetrate Service Bridge to Deliver a Better Experience to 90+ Million Gamers.
Benefits: Modernized Infrastructure with No Business Disruption
Mobile Premier League is a shining example of an organization embracing the power of service mesh to rapidly and easily convert their VM-based workloads to a Kubernetes-based architecture. Using Tetrate Service Bridge, MPL was able to accomplish this feat without disrupting service to their 90 million-plus gaming community. The combination of Tetrate Service Bridge and Tetrate’s expert support services met the evolving needs of DevOps and It teams, making K8s deployment more efficient, more manageable, more resilient and more secure, irrespective of the scale and diversity of the environment. This approach ensures a more streamlined and secure way for developers to access and manage their K8s clusters, enabling them to focus more on building and deploying applications rather than the complexities of network configurations and security.
The journey MPL traveled in VM onboarding, migrating all applications to Docker-based Kubernetes microservices, and then phasing out all of their VMs is exemplary and should inspire others who want to take the same journey to cloud-native infrastructure and all the advantages it offers to modern enterprises. MPL is now better positioned for future success in a cloud-native environment and can continue to innovate and drive the evolution of eSports both in India and internationally. Other benefits of working deploying Tetrate Service Bridge include:
- Provide a secure and reliable runtime environment for cloud-native workloads at scale
- Achieve cost efficiency by shifting from overhead-laden VMs to lightweight container
- Free up workloads to run on any on-premise or public cloud architecture
- Enable secure, Zero Trust architecture by default