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When Boston Celtics CTO Jay Wesland started working with the National Basketball Association team in 1990, the era of big data was still far away – especially in the professional sports arena.
Digital data was cheaper than paper six years ago and six years later when Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics played through a storybook season author Michael Lewis analyzed in his 2003 book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.”
Modernization for the Celtics in the 1990s meant collecting basic data on courtside computers, a practice that only took hold after Wesland’s arrival. When the 78-year-old NBA franchise hired Wesland as director of technology in 2000, IT had not advanced much. The organization promoted him to CTO in 2016.
“I can’t imagine why a pro sports team would even need a CTO, but, in today’s world, everything revolves around the tech stack and technology,” Wesland said last month at his organization’s meeting of six Said during a virtual program on the occasion. -Cloud’s journey.
Professional sports, like any other big business, is a data-driven, IT-dependent enterprise, where elastic compute and scalable storage provide a competitive edge – on and off the court. From banking to basketball, cloud modernization has become table stakes.
“It’s now far beyond the SQL servers and Web servers that I could have built myself,” Wessler said. “We need a lot of help to do this.”
The Celtics moved increasingly to the cloud in 2017, and chose AWS as their primary provider. The initial lift-and-shift took months, not years, according to Jonathan LaCour, CTO of Mission Cloud, the AWS consulting service that managed the migration.
“Technically speaking, 99% of the infrastructure was moved out of on-premises,” LaCour said in an interview with CIO Dive.
That’s when the real work of reengineering legacy applications, rationalizing data assets, and optimizing the technology stack began. “Since then, modernization and refinement have been ongoing,” LaCour said.
data tipping point
Digital transformation is not a one-time effort. Unexpected technical debt plagues cloud deployments, reducing efficiency and increasing costs. Organizations that lack a solid cloud business strategy or migration plan may not be able to look closely enough to see the ROI.
“People can get into a situation where they migrate and then leave it there and they become disenfranchised,” LaCour said. “If you’re running your data center workloads in the cloud, this is not the way to save money.”
Waysland had a relatively small IT group and the infrastructure it built from the ground up to transfer decades of data.
“We ran everything on Windows in our data center — if you can call it a data center,” he said. “It was actually a room in the back of my office with some racks.”
Data was the turning point.
As games and business became more analytics driven, Waysland’s SQL servers were strained to keep pace with the workload. Lack of computing resources on the backend resulted in a competitive disadvantage.
The data from the West Coast won’t arrive in time to be processed before the next game, Wesland said. The coach would arrive at the team facility after a night game and ask for a report from Westland’s team that they lacked the technique to produce quickly.
“The prior infrastructure was what you would call startup infrastructure,” LaCour said. “They bought a lot of off-the-shelf software to meet their use cases and focused on hiring statisticians, data analysts, and data scientists.”
Cloud talent was not something Wesland already had.
“They knew they might not be AWS experts, but they wanted access to the cloud,” LaCour said.
4-step migration
As of 2017, Wesland was running an analytics shop. The SQL servers they built were straining to keep pace with the workload and pace of the NBA.
Migration has to start somewhere but it also needs a long-term roadmap. Mission Cloud set out a four-part plan for the organization, which was outlined in a case study published last month.
Wesland described the initial lift-and-shift to AWS as a proof of concept that demonstrated an organization could take what was on-premises and scale it to the public cloud. The migration addressed one of Celtic’s biggest problems – speed and scalability – almost immediately.
“The workload on the Celtics is enormous,” LaCour said. “They also had a very specific challenge to solve: We have big iron in Jay’s office, which allows us to scale vertically, but we run into limitations and it takes us 14 to 14 hours to process the data. It takes 15 hours. This is the perfect use case for the cloud.
The heavy lifting began in the second phase, when Wesland retired its MS SQL Server, moved from Windows to a Linux-based operating system and opened up serverless containers.
“The most challenging thing was making that first jump from MS SQL and Windows,” Wesland said. “Our heads explode just thinking about it. It was tough but we overcame it.”
The team ultimately decided on Snowflake for data and a single cloud for everything else.
“Our experience is that most of our customers are not interested in being multicloud because it complicates their use case significantly,” LaCour said.
