Our Client
Genius Sports uses data to power products for sports leagues, teams, and betting companies worldwide.
At a Glance
Genius Sports needed to exit its legacy data center on a fixed deadline — without disrupting the live sports data services its customers depend on. A lift-and-shift wasn't viable. Working with SoftServe, Genius Sports completed a full AWS migration two months ahead of its internal deadline and within 15% of its pre-migration infrastructure costs — while modernizing its entire application stack in the process.
Genius Sports helps sports leagues, teams, and betting companies use data to power their products and engage fans.
As the company grew quickly, it moved its systems to AWS to improve performance and scale. The migration focused on two benefits:
- Lower costs and more reliable systems through better monitoring, security, and stability
- Faster product development, so they could respond faster to customer needs
Our collaboration with SoftServe was an important contributor to us completing our cloud migration on time. They willingly undertook co-ownership of delivering our envisioned results, driving with their considerable expertise. The team exhibited an impressive level of professionalism throughout the course of our engagement. Their consistent flexibility and competency solidified our trust in their capabilities.CTO, Genius Sports
Partnering With SoftServe for a Reliable Migration
Genius Sports chose SoftServe because we understood how applications, infrastructure, and databases connect — and what breaks when you move them.
Lift-and-shift was not an option.
Moving workloads without modernizing them would have transferred the technical debt to a new environment. The migration needed to stay within budget and comply with the approved technology standards of the wider organization. Modernization had to be built into the migration itself, not treated as a follow-on project.
Genius Sport's AWS Migration Requirements
Genius Sports' infrastructure ran on a virtualised Microsoft Windows 2008 environment with .NET Framework 4.6 applications. Monolithic proprietary databases restricted their ability to scale and innovate. To move forward without investing in new hardware, Genius Sports needed to:
- Modernise .NET Framework applications to run as Linux containers on .NET Core, hosted on Amazon EKS.
- Migrate from self-managed RabbitMQ to the AWS-managed service AmazonMQ for RabbitMQ.
- Transition from proprietary databases to open-source engines to reduce licence fees.
- Develop a comprehensive migration and communication plan for their customers.
- Transition existing Jenkins pipelines to GitLab CI.
- Strengthen their security posture.
The migration approach
A migration this big — with many applications, databases, and a system still running — needed a plan that could be tested first.
The solution: a reusable migration tool.
Instead of moving each application one by one, the team created a tool they could use again and again. This made the process more consistent and partly automated.
The tool helped with:
- Setting up workloads
- Creating database structures
- Moving data and checking if it was ready
- Managing the final switch (cutover)
- Tracking progress in the project
The team updated and improved the applications at the same time as the migration.
Application dependencies were prepared ahead of schedule, allowing direct testing on final platforms without intermediary stages. The approach included:
- Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL, the new database they moved to
- Amazon Database Migration Service to move data safely
- Schema Conversion Tool to convert old database formats to the new one
- GitLab CI on Amazon EKS replaced the old system (Jenkins) with the new cloud-based pipeline.
Problems can go unnoticed until users report them.
To avoid this, the team ran both systems at the same time, and compared their results. Before switching over, they confirmed everything worked the same.
Genius Sports completed the migration on time, with controlled costs, stronger security, and more reliable systems.
They also fully modernized their applications and simplified processes.
To reduce risk, the team was ready early — they prepared for the final switch a month in advance and exited the data center on schedule, even finishing two months ahead of their original deadline.
Results included:
- Controlled costs — cloud costs increased by only 15%, avoiding unexpected spikes
- Simpler processes, while still meeting all security and compliance requirements
- Fully modernized applications and systems (technical debt cleared)
- Better security and reliability
Mike Patel, CTO of Genius Sports, credited our co-ownership mindset and consistent flexibility as central to hitting the deadline.
