Bespin Global helps Caesars to achieve 60% cloud cost savings and accelerate processing speeds with Google Cloud and BigQuery

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Caesars prepares for future growth and reduces costs by optimizing cloud storage Caesars Entertainment’s Sportsbook App is a platform used by customers across the United States for online betting. As more states began approving online betting, Caesars saw an increase in demand for their online service which created a surge in cloud services costs.Anticipating that high demand would continue, Caesars reached out to Bespin Global for a supportive, cost-effective solution. Using BigQuery and Google Cloud Platform, Bespin Global reduced cloud spending costs by over 60%, and developed a unified data analytics platform in Google Cloud to generate additional insights and revenue opportunities.

BACKGROUND 

Caesars experiences rapid growth with Caesars Sportsbook expansion Caesars Entertainment is a gaming and hospitality services provider which owns and operates gaming and non-gaming properties throughout the United States. Their app, Caesars Sportsbook, has provided mobile sports betting since 2021. The sports betting industry was federally regulated until 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a federal law banning most commercial sports betting. As more states introduced legislation to approve sports betting, Caesars Sportsbook experienced an increased demand for their platform.

THE CHALLENGE

Caesars faces skyrocketing cloud costs due to exponential growth in data volume as Caesars Sportsbook expands.

Caesars was already working with a leading cloud provider to store and transform data generated by gaming and other online transactions. However, the growing customer pool caused cloud costs to skyrocket, and Caesars anticipated the price would continue escalating as Caesars Sportsbook began operating in more states. While this platform worked well on a small scale, it became increasingly difficult to efficiently scale as the volume of daily transactions grew exponentially. The team knew rapid growth would also bring an increase in cloud management and storage costs.

“About fifteen states had already approved online betting, and several more were in the process of getting approved,” said Pratik Shah, Engineering Director at Bespin Global. “Caesars was concerned that the huge increase in data volume would, in turn, increase costs to maintain real-time transactions, as well as generate insights and actions.” For instance, Caesars was already spending thousands of dollars each day just to load the events data and aggregate it for analytics needs.

Caesars needed to optimize their cloud usage to increase the return on their cloud costs while ensuring they could still efficiently and effectively manage the large volume of data they were generating. They also needed to position themselves to continue receiving increased data warehouse workloads as Caesars Sportsbook became available in new states.

SOLUTION

Revolutionizing Data Warehouse Optimization: How Bespin Global led Caesars to scalable and cost-effective solutions.

As a cloud first, data-driven organization, Caesars was already leveraging technology to generate business insights and analytics, but needed a strategic, scalable and cost-effective alternative to their current solution. Caesars tasked Bespin Global to analyze and then present viable solution options

Bespin Global was already working closely with Caesars’ IT team providing managed services. Bespin Global’s depth of experience and deep employee knowledge of cloud migration and optimization made them an ideal partner for this additional project.

“Since Bespin Global was an existing partner with Caesars, the IT management team asked if Bespin Global could take the lead on finding a smart solution for handling large transactions for online betting-related transactions,” said Shah.

Bespin Global analyzed strategic options to efficiently reverse engineer daily load processing, focusing on cost-effectiveness and scalability. They examined opportunities to optimize the existing platform to reduce expenses. After the setup of the Google Cloud Platform for BigQuery, Bespin Global’s engineering team began working on the pipeline build and explored various options to load the data in BigQuery. The engineering team performed multiple iterations to optimize the data warehouse workload and cost using fixed-slot options, as well as on-demand and hybrid approaches, to evaluate and document the cost implications.

RESULT

Winning the Bet: Bespin Global's cloud optimization brings big savings and boosts business insights for Caesars with over 60% cost reduction.

Winning the Bet: Bespin Global's cloud optimization brings big savings and boosts business insights for Caesars with over 60% cost reduction 

After assessing the options, Bespin Global’s engineering team recommended leveraging hybrid slots so Caesars’ customer team could have more control on how to use the slots for batch processing and heavy loads.

When Bespin Global compared the cost to build the data pipeline in the current cloud solution platform against building the new system, the results were astounding. The new system was 60% more cost-effective, and yet there was no change in processing time. Migrating the solution to BigQuery proved to be the most cost-effective and scalable solution, without compromising on performance or functionality.

“Bespin Global is a Google Cloud Premier Partner and has the in-house skills to provide work to customers on the Google Cloud ecosystem,” said Shah. “Our team of certified cloud architects and cloud professionals had the expertise and experienced resources to get Caesars’ project done in eight weeks.”

Along with cost savings from moving to Google Cloud, Caesars’ business team can use the data generated from BigQuery to better understand user patterns.

FUTURE

Future Success: Bespin Global provides continued support to Caesars as they migrate to Google Cloud Data Platform.

Bespin Global, in collaboration with the Google Cloud Training Team, continues to support Caesars as they fully migrate to the new solution. “We are enabling Caesars’ technical team to make sure they understand the solution and the new platform,” said Shah. “The Google Cloud Training Team will work closely with Caesars’ team to understand what level of training is required and will provide them with a custom training plan.”

Once the migration project is complete, Caesars and Bespin Global will continue working together to optimize Caesars’ cloud spend and give them better management of IT resources and processes with the Google Cloud data platform.